Firefox 29: Redesign

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 29 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. This is a massive release: Firefox Sync has been revamped and is now powered by Firefox Accounts, there's a new customization mode, and the company's major user interface overhaul Australis has finally arrived. 'The tabs are sleek and smooth to help you navigate the Web faster. It’s easy to see what tab you’re currently visiting and the other tabs fade into the background to be less of a distraction when you’re not using them. The Firefox menu has moved to the right corner of the toolbar and puts all your browser controls in one place. The menu includes a “Customize” tool that transforms Firefox into a powerful customization mode where you can add or move any feature, service or add-on.' Here are the full release notes and a demo video."

Comments

more downgrades

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox becomes less usable and less configurable with each release. Might as well use Chrome at this point, it's virtually indistinguishable.

Re:more downgrades

[Cenan]

I would, if Chrome supported a NoScript type plugin.

Re:more downgrades

[TheRaven64]

FireFox with the self-destructing cookies plugin is the first Android browser I've found with a cookie-management system that seems to be designed for users and not for advertisers. I tried one of the early versions of FireFox for Android and wasn't impressed, but the latest ones are very nice. I've now switched to using it as the default browser for my phone.

Re:more downgrades

[gstoddart]

Well, it's called ScriptSafe, and I'm running it right now.

It certainly does exist.

Re:more downgrades

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox becomes less usable and less configurable with each release. Might as well use Chrome at this point, it's virtually indistinguishable.

So replace an uncustomizable piece of shit browser with another one ?
No thanks, I'll take Seamonkey or even old Opera pre 15.

Re:more downgrades

[jfengel]

I run with NoScript on Firefox, and unfortunately I'm finding more and more web sites are unusable without Javascript enabled not just for them (and the cloud provider, who could be serving up god-knows-what) but for zillions of "partners". I don't know what those partners are providing, either: probably mostly ancillary crap but the page won't render until it's downloaded.

I keep a NoScripted Firefox for any time I'm visiting web sites that I don't know beforehand; if they don't render then I don't need it that badly. But on my work computers, where I'm browsing only sites that I have reason to believe have things I need and aren't too terribly likely to be hijacked, I've found I just had to turn NoScript off.

That sucks, because the fact is that the vast majority of sites do shit with Javascript that the site would be just plain better off without. I don't object to their need to earn a living by feeding me ads, which is why I don't run with an ad blocker, but Javascript is very easy to abuse, and too many of them create abusive design.

Re:more downgrades

[Arker]

"Firefox becomes less usable and less configurable with each release. "

True, and it not just configurability. It's been on a persistent and unshakeable course of deteriorating functionality and usability for years. Even sticking to the long-term releases and avoiding the newest breakage it's still awful and obviously only getting worse. I think there is a real need for a fork of firefox and a sane team to maintain it, and I would be happy to contribute to some form of crowdfunding to bring it about, but...

"Might as well use Chrome at this point, it's virtually indistinguishable."

Sorry, I still think you are off-base here. As horrid as Firefox has become, it still has a ways to go before it can compete with Chrome for worst browser. It still uses the file system more-or-less correctly, and it's still possible (with extensions, at least) to disable javascript properly.

Firefox is horrible but it's still the best general purpose browser available, that's what makes the whole situation so horrific. If there were any other browser that were better I would be happy to switch, but these days it seems they all aspire to become adware just like chrome.

Re:more downgrades

[rudy_wayne]

I would, if Chrome supported a NoScript type plugin.

Actually Chrome allows you to selectively disable Javascript by domain. Chrome's only good feature and a feature that I wish Firefox would copy.

NoScript blocks all Javascript by default and forces you to manually whitelist everything. Unfortunately, that's now the exact opposite of what we need. NoScript was created back in the old days when you could completely disable Javascript and most websites would still mostly work. Now, more and more sites won't load at all -- you literally get a blank page -- without Javascript.

Re:more downgrades

[ChronoReverse]

There's a called YesScript that lets you do that in Firefox. Extensions is still the reason why I use Firefox/Pale Moon.

If you don't like Australis, there's an extension to make Firefox look like classic. If you think the Australis buttons are too large (like me) then you can install an extension to make them smaller.

Re:more downgrades

[StarFace]

Have a look at SeaMonkey. It is the way Firefox used to be before it all started to go to shit when Chrome came out. It is as far as I know, the last real browser being maintained, since Opera died.

You get extension compatibility with FF, too.

Re:more downgrades

[TheGratefulNet]

But exactly what I would expect from a browser written by an advertising company.

I want no part of chrome or chromium. it has that bad google taste to it.

if google touched it, its not trustable. my (not so new) motto.

Re:more downgrades

[Mirar]

You might want to try RequestPolicy as an alternative. It allows script, it just refuses to load anything from a third party site unless you specifically allow it. I like it. (But it's UI is daft.)

Re:more downgrades

[drobety]

Try HTTP Switchboard. https://github.com/gorhill/htt... Hard to beat,

Re:more downgrades

[drobety]

You are wrong: https://github.com/gorhill/htt...

Re:more downgrades

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

Someone asked the Seamonkey developers months ago if they were going to implement Australis: No, not enough resources, not enough interest.
Firefox are essentially making the same step Microsoft did with Windows 8 - unifying their look-and-feel across platforms (PC/Laptop, Tablet, Phone) and we all know how that went. Seamonkey makes absolutely no sense on a Tablet or Phone so the developers feel no need to move that way. What could cause problems in the medium term - and I simply don't know if this is a danger - is that the Seamonkey code is largely based on the Firefox and Thunderbird code bases. Bugs in F+T propagate across to Seamonkey, as do the fixes. I *think* that Australis is independent of the underlying code but the chances of me being wrong are probably 50%.

Re:more downgrades

[50000BTU_barbecue]

ctrl shift k

Just dig around in there.

Re:more downgrades

[jez9999]

Check out SeaMonkey and Pale Moon. Both offer traditional style Firefox interfaces with the Gecko rendering engine. If you go with SeaMonkey and want a nicer theme, check out my theme (in my sig) :-)

Re:more downgrades

[elmohound]

I've been using SeaMonkey for many years. Although the lack of support for some of my favorite add-ons has been enough of a hassle that I don't use it quite as much as I used to. Given the revelations about FF 29, though, I think it's going to become popular for me again starting today! There is one big problem, however, for the last 2-3 weeks I've not been able to open Yahoo! mail messages in SeaMonkey. Maybe this sea-change at Mozilla will provide that last final push for me leave Yahoo with it's lack of POP or IMAP, and it's periodic "improvements" behind once-and-for all. (Every time they upgrade, they degrade the Yahoo experience to the point that I'm hardly shouting yahoo. Does this sound like a familiar theme?).

Oh, in case you are wondering about the add-ons not supported for SeaMonkey, here are two that I love.

      ColorfulTabs
      MultirowBookmarks Toolbar Plus

Again, I'd rather lose them than move to FF29.

Re:more downgrades

[Antiocheian]

Try Pale Moon or PM4Linux.

Re:more downgrades

[labnet]

Except Chrome ditched side tabs 2 years ago. I'm not sure how anyone uses 16:9 screens without moving tabs bars for whatever software they can, to the side. In FF this the treeview addin. In windows, unlock and move the start bar to the side.

Re:more downgrades

[citizenr]

Its hilariously sad how new UI skin is touted as reimagining the whole browser.
Opera had fully customizable UI 12 years ago? And look at us now, somehow we moved back in functionality, even Opera nowadays is nothing more than a bad non-customizable Chrome skin :(

I dread the day most of the web stops working on Opera 12.16. I wont be even able to tune Chromium to my specific needs, after all it requires 16GB of ram to compile now (and that number will probably grow).

Re:more downgrades

[StarFace]

In the past few years I've taken to just not even using a stylesheet when I browse. This isn't always easy to do in the browser, but some extensions can help. Web Developer extension can assign a keyboard shortcut so that if the design is super offensive I can just go back to something that uses a font size and window width I prefer. It often means scrolling past a header area rife with bullet lists, but that's an acceptable compromise for me.

Unfortunately some sites do not even gracefully degrade to simple display such as that, as they have a bunch of dumb Javascript stuff that is hidden by default, like "Page didn't load successfully" messages and progress spinners doing nothing. Ha. Yeah, it is getting to the point where browsing the web is like reading a crappy grocery stand magazine. I find myself doing less and less of it as well.

Maybe all of us that care should just move back to Gopher. :)

Re:more downgrades

[thetoadwarrior]

It doesn't really look like Chrome aside from having slightly more rounded tab corners but if that is too similar for you and you want the added benefit of Chrome showing that dumb sad faced folder far too often because it chooses not to run your javascript and the shoddy performance in general with the added spying then go for it.

It still puzzles me how people who claim to be more technically minded hate change more than my computer illiterate grandmother. If it confuses you then computers might not be your thing.

Re:more downgrades

[Arker]

Well they marked the bug as 'fixed' back in 2010 but I have continued to hear it does not actually work right. Here is one example. Giorgio (the NoScript guy) knows what he is talking about on this subject, so I suspect despite your screenshot there is still a problem.

Re:more downgrades

[psyclone]

Also try Ghostery and Disconnect if you want to block known advertising sites. It lets through all the requests to cloud providers like //ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js and such which track you, but if you also run Cookie Monster and Referrer Control, they don't get much.

I would love a noscript/request policy like addon that would allow me to substitute "common" shared resources, like jquery or bootstrap, from a local cache.

Re:more downgrades

[Arker]

I took a look at Pale Moon and I am still not sure if it's a good idea or not.

There are a few points of departure and while most sound good a couple sound really bad. First off "disabled accessibility features." This sounds like a pointless stab in the face to our blind friends. I hope it's not as bad as it sounds, but disabling accessibility features does not sound like a sane design choice at all. And optimising for 'modern' cpus only is something I expect a talented but green 16 year old to think is a good idea, but it usually is not. Modern CPUs are already optimized to run ancient code to begin with so it's rare to see this actually improve performance significantly, and it will cause the program to break on old hardware or even on extremely new hardware when you try to use it in a VM (which typically simulates an older processor.)

If you know anything more about what accessibility options, exactly, they removed, and how practical it would be to try to re-enable and recompile it, please do let me know. So far I find very little information on their page.

Re:more downgrades

[jez9999]

The Yahoo! mail problem has been fixed in trunk, so it will soon work again in SeaMonkey.

Re:more downgrades

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this is a bad idea. The reason you block JS from untrusted domains is because that JS is the primary delivery mechanism for 99.9% of exploits.

JS needs to be whitelist only. It's just basic security practice. Whatever fucking moron decided it was appropriate to automatically load and execute code from untrusted domains needs to be shot.

What we need to do is correct this bad security paradigm. Browsers should, by default, run JS by whitelist only. (Maybe with some sort of trusted certificate based white list service to make use easier for major popular websites.)

This will force website creators to temper the currently ridiculous and frankly abusive spamming of shit JS all over every fucking page, ever. Seriously. Got go any major website and you'll be asked to execute 50+ scripts from, in some cases, dozens of different domains. That shit isn't necessary. It's just lazy development practice. Most of it is downright abusive ad, tracking, and analytic garbage that you don't want to run anyway.

Re:more downgrades

[DaTrueDave]

There are plenty of websites that display no content of substance without javascript. If you've only come across one website that requires javascript, your websurfing habits are extremely limited.

And, no, I'm not going to make you a list of examples, it would be a much shorter list if you gave examples of websites that don't require javascript.

Re:more downgrades

[drobety]

> Giorgio (the NoScript guy) knows what he is talking about on this subject, so I suspect despite your screenshot there is still a problem Screenshot is from 2012, for another blocker. HTTP Switchboard doesn't use the problematic API, which doesn't work reliably because it is asynchronous. It injects Content Security Policy header synchronously: it is rock solid in preventing JS from executing. Reputation is something to respect, but hard technical facts come first for me.

Re:more downgrades

[edibobb]

Does this mean the new menu requires an additional mouse click? I can hit alt-B for bookmarks today. If I upgrade, do I lose this functionality? Does anybody care about ease of use any more, or is it just looks?

Re:more downgrades

[thunderclap]

Have a look at SeaMonkey. It is the way Firefox used to be before it all started to go to shit when Chrome came out. It is as far as I know, the last real browser being maintained, since Opera died.

You get extension compatibility with FF, too.

Care to explain the 'since Opera Died' comment? Opera 20 Release notes Release date: 2014-03-04 Doesn't look dead to me. Yes, they are keeping up with chromium but chromium is not chrome. Opera is still Opera. Sadly I would be on Opera all the time but the extensions on FF (download helper and image resizer) force me to put up with the insanity.

Re:more downgrades

[Arker]

Eh, actually Firefox is supposed to be the light-weight, browser only version of Seamonkey. I see Seamonkey still includes an email client, an irc client, even a 'wysiwyg editor' that brings back memories of utter horror. The browser interface does seem to have changed a lot less, of course, but it still looks like the same over-engineered lump of cruft that inspired Firefox to begin with.

Re:more downgrades

[StarFace]

Opera died in the sense that it is no longer a leader in browser technology, as it has been for well over a decade, and is just skinning the Chromium project now. Out of context, that's okay, there have been plenty of skinning projects over the years that have been worth merit, but its the equivalent of say, Mozilla just giving up and using the IE engine and building a shell around it. They have ditched all of their code, from what I can tell, and unless you are keen on Chromium in general, I don't really see why you would be inclined to use the newer Opera versions over grabbing the latest Chromium build.

Opera before the transition vs. now simply is not comparable on any grounds. I used Opera for years, it was my favourite browser even though it didn't have the extension library that FF did, in large part because it natively did what it needed to do without extensions, and I liked their M2 client as well, which was one of the few e-mail clients that captured some of what Gmail got right. But, all of that is gone now. 100%, gone.

Perhaps some day they will rebuild some of their legacy, but I'm not crossing my fingers, especially with the misguided notions about bookmarks being worthless and so on.

Re:more downgrades

[Arker]

"HTTP Switchboard doesn't use the problematic API, which doesn't work reliably because it is asynchronous. It injects Content Security Policy header synchronously: it is rock solid in preventing JS from executing."

So I did a little checking and Http Switchboard appears to disagree with your 'rock solid' assessment. This is from late last year and is not resolved yet. This post by HTTP Switchboard author Raymond Hill, also from late last year, indicates he is still struggling with an asynchronous API. A temporary workaround was proposed to disable javascript entirely and then let the extension only activate rather than suppress, but this had undesirable and unworkable side effects.

"Reputation is something to respect, but hard technical facts come first for me."

Indeed. It appears the hard technical fact is that Chromes architecture still prevents proper noscript.

Re:more downgrades

[Arker]

"This fixes #35"

Did you not notice that the bug was re-opened the same day as the fix was not satisfactory, and months later it was closed again, with another workaround also acknowledged to be less than ideal?  "Found a fix, so far it's working well. Will test more. Side-effect of the fix: blocked javascript won't be shown as blocked by chromium/chrome in the omnibar... "

This is no myth. It is clearly true that chromium could not reliably block scripts as recently as December of last year, and I have yet to see evidence that this problem which has affected Chrome from the very first release has actually been fully resolved at this point.

Re:more downgrades

[StarFace]

Yeah, it still includes everything the old Mozilla suite did, though you can largely ignore all of that. I don't use ChatZilla and all that. The only important thing to me is that the browser component is sufficiently configurable and efficient. Firefox had the right idea to begin with, way back when, but in my opinion it has gone too far along the path of simplification and just seems to be trying to play catch up with a false target these days. I stopped using it several years ago when it was clear that the vision for Firefox wasn't in line with what I wanted out of a browser.

Re:more downgrades

[burbilog]

Might as well use Chrome at this point, it's virtually indistinguishable.

Chrome STILL does not have vertical tabs. Unfortunately Google killed that feature a few years ago for some unknown reasons :( Otherwise I'd switch to Chrome immediately...

Re:more downgrades

[Kirth]

Nope. Cut&Paste on Chrome/Chromium is totally broken on X11. Has been since forever, and they won't fix it. They think cleaning the paste-buffer on the mouse whenever you open a new tab is a good idea.

Re:more downgrades

[Goaway]

That is the most hilarious misinterpretation of browser development history I have ever heard.

No, SeaMonkey is like what Mozilla used to be, before Firefox was created to make a browser that was not a terrible piece of shit!

Re:more downgrades

[bingoUV]

Ok. Preliminary investigation shows :

1. No mouse gestures
2. No tab kit (or any tree style vertical tab bar solution)
3. No vimperator / pentadactyl
4. No simple Xpath checker - probably web developer can be hacked to do something for this.

The extension compatibility is not trivial - firefox plugins do not get installed on seamonkey from within the browser. Any solutions to these?

Re:more downgrades

[0111 1110]

It still puzzles me how people who claim to be more technically minded hate change more than my computer illiterate grandmother.

Strawman. We only hate change when it makes things worse or when it is just random redesign which is change just for the sake of change. If I get a can of fluorescent yellow spray paint and paint your car with it one night while you sleep and you see your red car turn yellow the next day are you going to embrace change?

Clearly the Mozilla devs have a design target in mind though: Chrome. If you like Google's browser then you will like the direction Firefox has been headed in for years. If you don't then you will probably find yourself switching to Pale Moon, Seamonkey, or Waterfox right about now. Or for Linux just never upgrading to version 29 since they cannot force upgrades in Linux.

Re:more downgrades

[elmohound]

I can verify that the problem reading Yahoo! mail has indeed been fixed in SeaMonkey. Thanks jez9999!

Re:more downgrades

[alexo]

You get extension compatibility with FF, too.

Do all FF/TB extensions work with Seamonkey?
(for a reasonable definition of "all").

Re:more downgrades

[StarFace]

Isn't that basically what I said? I think you're misreading me. SeaMonkey is an evolution from Mozilla as Firefox is, they are two separate forks from the same source, but SeaMonkey retains the core Mozilla design in its browser component (not to mention the suite aspect) whereas Firefox has gone consumer-oriented. However both started out from Mozilla, so saying that SeaMonkey is more like how Firefox used to be is not inaccurate.

Re:more downgrades

[StarFace]

It looks nice, but unfortunately it is Windows-only from what I've seen? I need Linux/Mac compatibility.

Re:more downgrades

[Reziac]

The ones I use in SM, yes. And I have compatibility-check turned off, having found that if something will install at all, it will work.

Re:more downgrades

[thetoadwarrior]

Funny how it seems no project ever gets it right when they change their interface. the complaints aren't exclusive to Firefox which says to me that people who claim to be tech ninjas might not be as good as they think with computers if all they go on to operate the thing is pure memorisation of the location of things.

So let's say it looks more like Chrome and that makes it worse. So the solution is to move to chrome? That makes no sense.

The biggest thing it did that might make it looks like Chrome is making it's tabs look more like folder tabs which is hardly exclusive to Chrome and it's minimised the space above the tabs. Boo hoo, it still has far superior extension support, superior handling of badly formed HTML, fails less frequently on shoddy JS and uses less system resources. Chrome has always used more resources but the google way of doing it was to make things feel more smooth so you don't realise it's pigging up more resource than IE or Firefox. Unfortunately for them everyone else is catching up on that idea and they're more efficient to begin with.

I don't mind their minimising either because unlike Chrome they don't enforce their minimalist design on you. It's still far more flexible and it doesn't do dumb things like force minimalism then put a big ugly download progress bar at the bottom of the window. So all in all it's still the superior product.

Re:more downgrades

[Antiocheian]

I have used my voice reader many times with Pale Moon and works perfectly. I have studied Firefox's accessibility features list and I haven't found anything that isn't supported by Pale Moon or the OS. I am using Pale Moon with font override for months since I don't want to give web authors another means to connect to Google for custom fonts.

I didn't care for the optimizations either, though people in the forums claim the gains are tangible. I started using Pale Moon after Firefox v4 because I didn't like re-editing my userchrome.css file every time Mozilla decided that Firefox needed a face lift.

Re:more downgrades

[Reapy]

Had to drop firefox finally because it failed to render text properly. I tried to follow the random threads of advice to disable this and that and flip this setting here or there, or uninstall xyz microsoft patch (which I couldn't find on my sytem). Either way it was all too much out of my day to try to even have to fix this, you would think rendering text, being the only thing a browser has to do, would be a pretty fucking serious priority to fix, but I guess not, lets move the fucking menu button to the right!

Re:more downgrades

[cavebison]

I think there is a real need for a fork of firefox and a sane team to maintain it

Give PaleMoon a try, it's based on Firefox but the devs seem more sane. It even has a 64-bit version. Better than SeaMonkey IMO.

Re:more downgrades

[Arker]

I recently gave seamonkey a try, and the only real cant live without extension I havent been able to get to work with it is tree style tabs. But yeah, that one is pretty important to me.

(As an aside, the built-in extension search has really turned to crap. I can search for the exact name of the extension I am looking for, it's hosted at addons.mozilla.org even, yet for some reason they just cannot find that extension and you have to find a direct link somewhere else to even get to it. )

Re:more downgrades

[toddestan]

Opera, after the 12.xx releases, is basically a reskinned chromium browser. Now, while the loss of the Presto rendering engine is regrettable, I could live with a version of Opera that had the same interface and features that I was used to, but using chromium under the hood. The problem is that they basically threw out the entire browser and started over again, and they've lost a lot of what made Opera great. Another problem is that they've dropped Linux support after the 12.xx releases, so if you run Linux then it's the end of the line (at least for now). Though interestingly they just dropped 12.17 a few days ago to patch up some SSL exploits so maybe there is still some hope.

As a long time Opera user I've been a bit lost. Between Firefox and Chrome I prefer Chrome, but don't really care for all the Googlely bits in Chrome. Debian provides a build of Chromium so I'm set there, and on Windows I've been trying Comodo Dragon, which I've been pretty happy with.

Re:more downgrades

[Zanadou]

http://sourceforge.net/project...

Re:more downgrades

[StarFace]

Sweet! Thanks, I'll check it out.

Re:more downgrades

[Mirar]

Actually I think the biggest issue I have with firefox is that it hangs for a few seconds now and then. I would suspect javascript garbage collection (probably caused by the multitude of addons I have to run to make it useful). Since it hangs completely - even ignores redraw events - it's kind of disturbing.

Re:more downgrades

[Zeio]

Yes, yes it is. Idiocracy was a documentary sent from the future.

UX losers are making cave-man interfaces everywhere.

Here is what the future holds where a Texas Instruments Speak-and-Spell would be ultra high tech.

http://i68.photobucket.com/alb...

-1 For Mozilla's new Museum of Tolerance behavior and for its horrible new Look and Feel. UX people are horrific. http://i68.photobucket.com/alb...

Re:more downgrades

[mcswell]

I program computers; changes don't confuse me. Changes without purpose (like tail fins on cars back in the 50s) annoy me, and changes that get in the way of what I want to do (like removing menus in Chrome, or replacing an easily modifiable menuing system with a virtually unmodifiable "ribbon" that lacks commands I need) are even worse.

Wow Looks Just Like Chrome ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'll just use Chrome instead.

Re:Wow Looks Just Like Chrome ...

[Control-Z]

Yeah if I wanted a browser with no conventional pull-down menus and no title bar I'd use Chrome.

Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[V for Vendetta]

For those that want the old GUI back: Classic Theme Restorer.

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just about over it. Now I need something like 10 different add-ons and a shitload of about:config editing just to get it back to square one. Honestly, if firefox has made any improvements since the 3.x series, I don't know what they are. All I see is regressions. OK, maybe the security is better. That's one point for firefox, and 100 points against.

We need a new "phoenix" -- one that I can simply install and begin using, not one that I need to work for hours on before using.

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should I have to use an add-on to get the classic theme back? This should be an option out of the box!

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[Anonymous Coward]

"if firefox has made any improvements since the 3.x series, I don't know what they are."
Like, pretty much anything that is not visible at first glance? Standards support, memory management, add-on handling, JavaScript performance, responsiveness, developer tools, networking, etc

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[rudy_wayne]

Why should I have to use an add-on to get the classic theme back? This should be an option out of the box!

Exactly right.

The bigger problem with the Classic Theme Restorer extension is that it only works with the default Firefox theme. Since the default Firefox them has sucked shit since sometime around version 4, it doesn't really solve most of the problems with the new Assholio version of Firefox.

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[TheGratefulNet]

sudo apt-mark hold firefox firefox-locale-en

that's my fix.

fuck you, firefox. your 'upgrades' have broken so much over time and costed me 'fix it back again, time' that I'm done with your upgrades.

I'll take my chances with security bugs; I prefer that problem to your endless 'change for change sake' attitude.

I value my plugins on FF and I will not risk losing any more time having to re-fix what you guys broke.

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[TheGratefulNet]

same feeling here: each forced upgrade has broken settings or filters that I had worked hard to get in place.

I simply now mark FF as 'on hold' and the plugins also don't autoupdate for me.

in fact, same thing with android. I now refuse to have 'play' auto update ANYTHING. and I only update if I need to or if there is a bug that is marked as fixed. otherwise, keep your stupid 'change because we're bored!' stuff to yourself, developers!

this is what happens when you have 'children' in charge. they change shit just because they think its cool; they could care less what load it puts on the userbase. they only code for their own egos. I really hate that and wish there were 'adults' in charge of the more important software projects out there.

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[houstonbofh]

"if firefox has made any improvements since the 3.x series, I don't know what they are." Like, pretty much anything that is not visible at first glance? Standards support, memory management, add-on handling, JavaScript performance, responsiveness, developer tools, networking, etc

And all the visible stuff that people actually see they keep beating with the ugly stick. Smart move!

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[Kierthos]

Thanks.

It doesn't change the background color or the text color of the menubar, but at least it looks better now.

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[Alumoi]

Or just use the esr release.

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[JohnFen]

I think that's about right. FF 4.0 was where the UI became utterly crappy -- but at least you could easily make it like it was before they decided to screw it all up. Now, it looks like you can't even do that without installing an add-on. If that ends up being the case, then clearly Firefox is not the browser for me at all anymore.

I remember thinking that their rapid release scheme was the worst thing they could do. I suspect that I was wrong, and they found something even worse.

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[Blaskowicz]

Please use the ESR version, that'd be nicer and you wouldn't be encouraging the noobs to not update their software for fixes of security faults.

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[ravenlord_hun]

You're right, most of those are not visible at first glance. Mostly because most them are things that were already there (I still use Firebug for development, for example) or because the changes are minimal (FF is right now using 2.2GB memory with 4 tabs open, I never noted any real increase in responsibility and FF still has a perchance to just randomly crash out, networking plain DOES NOT WORK if you use a proxy that overrides SSL certs etc etc).

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[0111 1110]

Or just use the esr release.

I am. Probably the only reason I've been able to stick with Firefox since the Rapid Release madness began. Since Firefox wanted nothing more than to be a Chrome clone. But it only delays the inevitable. The shit UX UIs eventually make it into the ESR too. No. I think I'm going to switch to Pale Moon or Waterfox now and preempt this shit before they shove it down the throats of the ESR people too.

In Linux you could just not upgrade since they cannot force upgrade you (at least not in Arch Linux), but obviously then you don't get security fixes. The writing has been on the wall for years now. I think it's about time to abandon ship.

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[TangoMargarine]

Exactly what I've been saying, every word.

Time for the rats to flee the sinking ship. SeaMonkey or Pale Moon.

Re:Addon: Classic Theme Restorer

[Badooleoo]

And the rest: http://www.dedoimedo.com/compu...

Still has a nasty bug on Private Browsing

[opusbuddy]

Since 28, if you open a Private Browsing window, no problem, but go to a bookmark and it switches screens back to the normal browsing mode!

Re:Still has a nasty bug on Private Browsing

[fermion]

I don't understand. Where is the privacy if you bookmark? Is the idea to not save cookies? I use a plugin to automatically reject all cookies. Privacy mode does not prevent suites from tacking you movement and IP.

Re:Still has a nasty bug on Private Browsing

[opusbuddy]

You do google in normal browsing mode? Yes, I use it to avoid cookies, flash cookies and the don't do evil guys.

It sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate the redesign, and spent far too long this morning dicking around with my browser. As an english reading individual, putting the main menu in the upper right corner feels stupid and non-natural. In general, the changes are too abrupt for my liking. It also COMPLETELY resets any customizing of your UI that you did in the past so you have to start from scratch again.

Thankfully, you can find an add-on called Classic Theme Restorer. Feels a little bit different, but it's close to what I had before.

no no no.

[jythie]

All,... I,.... want,.... is,.... an,.... expletive,.... web,.... browser!

Seriously, I just want to access web pages, I want to think about the browser itself as little as possible.

Re:no no no.

[rasmusbr]

All,... I,.... want,.... is,.... an,.... expletive,.... web,.... browser!

Seriously, I just want to access web pages, I want to think about the browser itself as little as possible.

Try surf. It meets and exceeds your requirements by also being able to follow links!

http://surf.suckless.org/

did you checked the video?

[JcMorin]

According to the video you can select the icons and menus you want to display in the toolbar... that include all the addons/plugins/extensions too. What customization has been dropped?

Re:did you checked the video?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the video you can select the icons and menus you want to display in the toolbar... that include all the addons/plugins/extensions too. What customization has been dropped?

How about a status bar? :)

Seriously, UX folks, just stop.

Your profession's insistence on itself has destroyed Digg, Flickr, Yahoo's message boards, Yahoo's email interface, Slashdot, Firefox, GNOME, and even Windows 8.

Your profession is a cancer upon this industry worse than marketing.

Re:did you checked the video?

[rudy_wayne]

According to the video you can select the icons and menus you want to display in the toolbar... that include all the addons/plugins/extensions too. What customization has been dropped?

The video is deliberately misleading and the claim of "a powerful customization mode where you can add or move any feature" is a complete lie.

A few examples:

Tabs On Top -- No thanks, I want my tabs below the URL bar, where God intended them to be. First, they removed the menu item a while back. No problem, I can just go into about:config and change it. But just removing the menu item and burying the setting in about:config isn't enough. With Australis, even if you go into about:config and change the setting, it does nothing. Firefox says: Fuck You. You're getting Tabs On Top whether you like it or not.

There are only 2 toolbars - Menu bar and Bookmarks toolbar. No more Add-On Bar, which means the Status Bar Extension doesn't work because there's no place to put it. Firefox says: You want a Status Bar? Fuck You. Sure there's probably some hidden fiddling you can do to work around the problem, but that just proves my point -- A user should not have to spend copious amounts of effort just to restore the standard and expected UI.

In Australis the Back and Forward buttons are now glued to the URL Bar, so you can't arrange your buttons any way you like. The Reload Button has been replaced with a swirly arrow that is glued to the far right side of the URL Bar and can't be moved, and the Stop Button is gone completely. Want text labels with your buttons? Firefox says: Fuck you.

There's a lot more, but I give up. If I wanted a browser with a lousy UI that can't be changed, I would use Internet Explorer or Chrome.

Just as I feared -- Firefox has joined the growing list of applications that can never be updated because the new version sucks.

Re:did you checked the video?

[znrt]

you're just not ready for a future dominated by retards.
but resistance is futile. you will be UXed.

Re:did you checked the video?

[houstonbofh]

Can't wait for Cinnafox and FireMate forks! Why do design guys always want to follow everyone else? For a while, everyone made a car that looked like a Honda. And that helped Honda. Suddenly these new cars come out that do not look like Honda and they do very well. Now it is Follow the Chrome. Guess what? If people want a browser to look like Chrome, they will download... (Wait for it) Fucking Chrome! This UI fascination with playing "Hide the Menus" is not appreciated. And much like the infamous "Hide the print button" Microsoft played with the original Office ribbon, guess what is back?

Re:did you checked the video?

[compro01]

You might like the Classic Theme Restorer addon. Tabs back down, multiple bars, back/forward separated and arbitrarily movable, reload next to them, addon bar back at the bottom, and text labels on everything.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use this to restore the old style with tabs on bottom https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemerestorer/

I researched it months ago when I learned about Australis.

Prove yourself question: "degrade". Such a irony :-)

Re:did you checked the video?

[koan]

And that's exactly what it is, the dumbing down, making the Internet a TV set.

Re:did you checked the video?

[vux984]

I actually love the lack of status bar

And until recently people like you could simply turn it off, while people like me could turn it on.

This seemed to be working fine for both of us. What was improved by changing this status quo?

Re: did you checked the video?

[Anonymous Coward]

You cannot customize the back, forward, refresh or stop buttons for starters. The 4 most common functions of any web browser, instead you have to use the IE styled, integrated-into-the-address-bar variety refresh/stop.

I've been a long FF hold out, preferring FF over alternatives because of how I could customize the interface. Now that it has been removed, I might as well go with chrome to at least get speed increase, and a Stop/Refresh button that is not on the opposite side of the screen of the Back button.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Grishnakh]

Idiocracy is coming, whether you want it or not. Might as well get used to it.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Xest]

According to the video... great, well, I just updated and tried it. Turns out my tabs now have a dark grey background with black text which is completely and utterly unreadable. I managed to get my title and menu bar back, but my status bar appears to have permanently fucked off. I'd like to imagine given that we have a great big ad here on Slashdot about how awesomely customisable it is that I can do something about the horrendously shit dark grey background that is too close to the black of the tab text, but I'll be damned if I can see any option whatsoever to actually do that.

But here's a better question, why rather than a browser update working for me, making things better, does it instead mean I have to dick around figuring out how to make it work like it's always worked and like I want it to work? Why do I have to fear updates wondering what the fuck they've broken now, or what the hell I'm going to have to get used to this time?

Re:did you checked the video?

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely nothing. But Firefox just got even more like a knockoff of Chrome, which is all Mozilla cares about anymore.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Anonymous Coward]

No thanks, I want my tabs below the URL bar, where God intended them to be.

Actually, Opera, which invented tabs, had the address bar below the tabs, so it was everyone else being the heretics by doing otherwise.

Speaking of Opera, I noticed that it's just a rethemed Chrome now. It's sad when Apple is the only one willing to break away from Google's design.

Re:did you checked the video?

[TheGratefulNet]

"go away! Makin'!"

/got nuthin

Re:did you checked the video?

[Anonymous Coward]

The developers could not sleep because you changed the defaults and the great UI they designed.
Now they can sleep well without nightmares of users configuring the software to their needs.

Re:did you checked the video?

[trawg]

The customisation isn't flexible enough - I can't move some of the objects (like the address bar) or move tabs to the bottom where they used to be. My interface has been completely reworked with no way to restore it to what it was, as far as I can tell.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Merk42]

Internet Explorer doesn't look like Chrome.

Re:did you checked the video?

[TheDarkMaster]

The problem is not the UX professionals per se. The problem is the large number of professionals with no experience or competence in making a elegant and practical GUI.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Arkh89]

Tabs On Top -- No thanks, I want my tabs below the URL bar, where God intended them to be.

That's because you are not using your brain. It makes strictly NO SENSE to have the address bar on top of the tab bar. For each tab in the bar, I expect the info of the particular page to be WITHIN the tab not somewhere else (like, on top).

And, on a side note, I hate the fact that the searches are common to all tab on the same basis as previously.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Virtucon]

Watch an Episode of the "Real Housewifes of X" where X in {OC, Atlanta, etc.} and you'll see that Idiocracy is already here.

Re:did you checked the video?

[TheDarkMaster]

Because most of these designers do not have any idea on how to create a good interface (beautiful and functional), so they prefer the security of mimicking the "chieftains" of design (the famous designers). That usually works, except when the chieftains are also without any idea of what works or not.

Re:did you checked the video?

[fustakrakich]

For a traditional UI in Mozilla plus all the other goodies you miss, Look no further

Re:did you checked the video?

[trawg]

The short answer:
- add-on bar has been removed
- ability to move tabs below ("browser.tabs.onTop") address bar is gone
- address bar cannot be moved when customising toolbars.

Classic Theme Restorer seems to fix most of these problems.

Re:did you checked the video?

[jader3rd]

There's a lot more, but I give up. If I wanted a browser with a lousy UI that can't be changed, I would use Internet Explorer or Chrome.

You hint at something interesting I find among people who consider themselves techies, and the rest of the world. Techies say "give me something that I can spend time customizing", everyone else says "give me something and if I like it out of the box, I'll use it; but if I don't I'll pick something I do like. I'm too busy to care to even know how it could be customizable". Plus, customization requires code to handle customization changes. And do you know what the fastest code is, the code that never executes. So sometimes developers need to make decisions around options and decide that something just won't be customizable for simplicities, or performances sake.

In my own life I think about how I spent time of the first computer that I personally owned. I'd browse around the internet finding desktop themes, and skins for different media players, and it was a big part of my computing experience. Then sometime around when I graduated from college I just stopped caring about those things. Now I greatly prefer default looks compared to how I can customize it, because I'm using the computer to do things beyond making my programs looks a certain way.

Re:did you checked the video?

[jez9999]

According to the video you can select the icons and menus you want to display in the toolbar... that include all the addons/plugins/extensions too. What customization has been dropped?

Just off the top of my head:
- No status bar (yeah, been that way for a while now)
- No big toolbar icons, they have to be small
- No text with toolbar icons
- No tabs-on-bottom
- Bye-bye bookmarks and history sidebars
- Adios Stop button
- In fact adios any clear, decent-sized reload or stop buttons... now you have a tiny icon in the URLbar that changes function based on the state of the tab; bad design
- Can't move back/forward buttons away from the URLbar
- Can't create new toolbars
- Of the whopping 2 toolbars you get, you can't move the URLbar to the lower 'bookmarks' toolbar

Re:did you checked the video?

[vux984]

If others need to turn it Off and others to turn it On, then it is broken as it can't exist.

Or it could prompt you the first time it loads to select a preference. Just saying. I don't think is the best solution, but the dilemma is easily resolved without having an initial default state.

I prefer the default being disabled.

I don't care what the default is to be honest; as long as it respects my choice once i've made it. Removing the option entirely is the problem.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Fizzol]

It looks like 29 kills the Status-bar-4ever add on as well. I also don't like that it moves the bookmark menu way across the screen. It's going to need some customization.

Re:did you checked the video?

[nospam007]

"I actually love the lack of status bar. I can see more of the page. "

I just press F11 if I want that.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or turning a computer into a PlaySkool Play Station

Re:did you checked the video?

[steelfood]

The thing that most annoys me about the add-on bar is that when you hover over a link, the destination shows up above the add-on bar. With a true status bar, the destination (and other status messges) appears in the bar, and doesn't take up more screen space than what's already taken up.

With the add-on bar, parts of the page are covered up that I don't always want covered up while loading or hovering over a link. It's a small thing, but it's something that keeps annoying me every so often, albeit infrequently.

The address bar under the tabs makes a lot of sense. It's probably the only UI change I approve of. The rest of the menu and buttons should go above the tabs.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Xest]

I want to thank you for this, it makes Firefox 29 usable again.

But part of me wonders if I'm missing the point, if they're so intent on breaking it then might I as well just move browsers now? If I'm having to rely on addons to make a browser work then am I not just sat precariously one step away from Mozilla deciding that addon is unacceptable and cancelling it anyway?

Perhaps it's time for a browser move regardless of the fact this exists, but again, thank you all the same, at least it buys me time to figure out whether I really want to continue to bother with Firefox anymore at all.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Blaskowicz]

Before it was removed, you could turn it off and lose the way of telling where a link pointed to. So not the same thing. With all respect, it didn't really have other uses anymore, except that's historically where Netscape 4.x put some icons. Some extensions would display things there and that's about it.
I do always make sure I use a file manager that has a status bar.

Re:did you checked the video?

[wordsnyc]

You may well know this, but Tab Mix Plus allows you to set custom tab text and background colors for current, unloaded, unread, read, etc., tabs. Quite handy. My "current" tab is always bright green.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Hognoxious]

Even if the famous designers are right copying them might be wrong. Why? Due to some subtle difference in context that UI fucktards are totally unaware of because they're interior designers trying to pass themselves off as architects.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Hognoxious]

There is no such thing as a UX professional. They're all idiots. OMG, make it orange!

Re:did you checked the video?

[Hognoxious]

By and large they have been replaced by UIs that don't suck, designed and implemented by ergonomists (human factors engineers, if you're in the colonies).

Fixed that for you.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Sloppy]

And if you don't like it, then you're an "elitist."

Re:did you checked the video?

[jmyers]

I am old enough to remember when UI's were very good. text on green screen terminal that were made to do exactly what was needed and were as simple as possible. Then computers got more powerful and people started designing GUIs that did in fact suck because the keyboard functions people had learned no longer worked or worked differently. Everything was quirky and ran very slow. Then hardware caught up and design got much better. Then web apps started to take off and the UIs sucked because of limited browser features and rookie web developers. Then programming tools and browser features improved and "web 2.0" UIs took hold and they got much better. Most of this evolution in design was driven to create the "next big thing", to wow users into wanting your design.

Now we are in a stagnant period where no new ground breaking PC technology has come along for a while. Tablets and smartphones took off so they appear to be getting all the attention. Designers and developers hungry to be on the verge of the next big thing are focusing on tablets and copying the big players like Google and Apple. At these companies design decisions are being made based on revenue streams rather than testing and user feedback. How do we make our product maintain it's branding? How to we guide the user into our revenue stream? It is no longer about what the users want tor need it is about forcing users into a tranche that can be exploited.

Re:did you checked the video?

[silanea]

[...] With all respect, it didn't really have other uses anymore, except [...] Some extensions would display things there [...]

Well, thank you very much for spelling out the very reason this change is a disaster. My browser toolbar is becoming more crowded by the week, and my extensions have lost the ability to display any text in the UI but are limited to one or a handful of icons. NoScript has been significantly impaired by this.

I am all for sleek sexy interfaces and killing old cruft and clutter. But "UX" has become a term non grata around the office of late thanks to all the morons who use it as an excuse for taking away control from the user.

Re:did you checked the video?

[jopsen]

And that's exactly what it is, the dumbing down, making the Internet a TV set.

Well, Firefox 29 does also improve builtin web developer tools significantly.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Blue Stone]

No status bar. No tabs under the URL bar. That's the opposite to the way I like it.

There's some great sickness running through the world of UI designers right now. From Windows 8 to the new Twitter design, to the proposed Slashdot beta, to this Firefox crap (while they tell you on the website, repeatedly, how it's all about having things the way you want them, the bloody liars).

What in the fuck is going on?

Re:did you checked the video?

[jez9999]

I want to thank you for this, it makes Firefox 29 usable again.

But part of me wonders if I'm missing the point, if they're so intent on breaking it then might I as well just move browsers now? If I'm having to rely on addons to make a browser work then am I not just sat precariously one step away from Mozilla deciding that addon is unacceptable and cancelling it anyway?

That's precisely the conclusion I came to (well not quite about the Mozilla-cancelling-it bit, more like "addon developer doesnt have time to maintain it") a year ago when I switched to SeaMonkey.

Re:did you checked the video?

[complete loony]

AFAIK this new firefox design predates chrome. It just wasn't implemented till now. Google copied firefox, they were just first to market since they decided to start their browser from scratch and threw more resources at the problem.

Re:did you checked the video?

[shutdown -p now]

Which browser are you going to move to, though? Chrome is the same by default, and with even less customization. IE is, well, IE. Opera is now a rebranded Chrome, and old versions (that were hyper-customizable) don't work all that well with modern websites anymore.

I do have some hopes for the Otter Browser, with its explicit design goal of recreating the Opera UI on a modern language. But it is still far off.

Re:did you checked the video?

[vux984]

With all respect, it didn't really have other uses anymore,

Thats sort of buying a van, and then having the dealer gradually remove all the doors and windows from a van and then declaring that you don't need all that cargo space either because it doesn't have any uses since you can't get to it, and then removing the removing the space too leaving you with a nice little 2 seater smart car.

But the whole reason I bought this car in the first place is because I wanted a VAN. Doors, windows, cargo space.

There are a LOT of things you could do with a status bar. You could display status... like WHAT THE FUCK IS THE BROWSER IS DOING RIGHT NOW now aka "STATUS"? I mean sure there is a spinning green circle in the tab icon space and that's all we get for feedback?

Download speed, how many items are in the download manager queue, dns look ups, time outs, server errors, do I have internet access, page validation status, plugins starting up, encryption characteristics, extensions / addon messages, what is it doing with cookies... I can imagine more things to do with the status bar then will FIT in 5 status bars. Do I want or need all of those all the time? Hell no... but I'm using firefox because I want more advanced feedback than a spinning circle.

Re:did you checked the video?

[sasparillascott]

Although the status bar is gone (which I liked having) if you mouse over a link - the address still pops up down there. Just an FYI...

Re:did you checked the video?

[Man On Pink Corner]

What in the fuck is going on?

As best I can tell, what's happening in the UX world is similar to what happened to fashion and hairstyles in the 1970s. (Almost) everybody just went crazy overnight for some reason. Some kind of brain parasite, maybe, carried by cats or birds.

The trend will eventually recede as quickly as it arrived, as plagues always do. Then we'll see functional, user-configurable interface design come back into favor. I've given up, personally. I'm just going to stop complaining and wait it out. It doesn't pay to be the only sane guy in the asylum.

Re:did you checked the video?

[houstonbofh]

I've got a friend who's a structural engineer. He got drunk and told me exactly what he thought of the general level of ability of architects. Next time I'll ask him about interior designers - I think he'll explode.

May have to keep that as a sig quote...

Re:did you checked the video?

[edibobb]

I agree. Software should be made (and kept) fast and easy. Pretty screens with hidden functions are counterproductive, regardless of how clean it looks in the boardroom.

Re:did you checked the video?

[johnsnails]

So is it fair to say that firefox is even more gay without brendan eich?

Re:did you checked the video?

[J-1000]

Eliminating the profession doesn't make the problem go away. It just hands the work off to a different set of people who are no less likely to screw it up. How about we be honest and admit that, like any other skill set out there, there are good designers and bad designers?

Re: did you checked the video?

[loufoque]

The point of the status bar is to give you the status of the current HTTP request.

It is very useful to know if data is being fetched or a name is being resolved.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Blaskowicz]

A lot of that stuff would belong to log files. A lot of it would happen so fast you don't have time to read it, and would even be unavailable to sight because of loading pages in background tabs (alternative is to display status info to what goes on in 5 tabs or just all tabs). It would often get flooded like a status LED blinking so fast it looks always on.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Xest]

Well for me the point is that I may not like Chrome's UI but if I'm going to be forced to get used to a different UI then I may as well do so on a browser that doesn't lose tabs like Firefox does every once in a while, that doens't keel over with certain addons like Firebug and such.

I don't want to get used to a different UI, I like the UI I'm used to, but if the writing us on the wall for the sort of UI I'm used to I might as well also make the jump somewhere that's more professional, competent, better performing, and reliable - and perhaps most importantly, doesn't have quite such a flagrant disregard for their users. Maybe such a browser vendor doesn't exist, but even if they can satisfy even one of those criteria then I'm still going to be in a better place if I'm to be forced to accept a new UI in the end anyway no?

Re:did you checked the video?

[NJRoadfan]

The War Against Menus continues. It is quite clear that nobody does user interface testing anymore.

Re:did you checked the video?

[0111 1110]

Is it a badge of honor to be willing to change for no reason other than you want to change? Because that is what this is about. And of course dumbing down the UI so that people with an IQ of 15 can still at least think they can use it except that they won't be able to find anything because it is all so cleverly hidden in the name of 'cleanliness'.

Re:did you checked the video?

[perryizgr8]

so?

Re:did you checked the video?

[TangoMargarine]

I notice that Status4Evar no longer works in 9 either. Fuck figuring out how to fix Firefox for the 12th time; I'm going full Pale Moon.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Bardez]

It was "Go Away! 'Batin' "

Re:did you checked the video?

[AmiMoJo]

The one thing that made Firefox good was that it was elitist, that it wasn't just dumbed down and simplified. It supported complex workflows, and incredible flexibility with add-ons. Mozilla seems to be destroying the one reason to use Firefox over Chrome or Opera.

Re:did you checked the video?

[LihTox]

The fact that you can have an addon like this in Firefox, is what makes me stick with Firefox. You can't move the tabs in Chrome at all.

Re: did you checked the video?

[AmiMoJo]

It's classic UX. By being able to see what is happening it appears to take longer. Hiding it makes the browser seem faster because you have nothing left to indicate the passage of time or the sequence of events that need to complete.

If the status bar were available as an option extensions might be tempted to use it, and then wouldn't work as well for people who hide it. Therefore it must be removed, because the --verbose option is always a bad idea.

Re:did you checked the video?

[TangoMargarine]

Plus, customization requires code to handle customization changes.

The more damning part is where the customization code already existed, but they keep taking it out.

One example that immediately springs to mind is the old download window--clean, efficient, did one thing and did it very well. Now it's been converted into the Library window with a bunch of shit I don't care about (and didn't they mash the Bookmarks window into it, too?). For the first version or two after that, they had an about:config setting to revert to the old one. Now they killed that.

Another--the status bar. Killed, but they added "add-on bars" to compensate. Now those have been killed, my Status4Evar is apparently dead (not so "forever" after all...), and the ~tooltip that used to be in the status bar when you hovered over a link is now crammed into a tiny text field only 2 inches across up in the right corner that's not even wide enough to display some fucking top-level domain names! I am literally unable to imagine how they could make that particular feature more inconvenient.

Re:did you checked the video?

[vux984]

It would often get flooded like a status LED blinking so fast it looks always on.

After you watch those logs flood by for a while, sure you don't keep up, and read every line, but you can extract information just in the way it flows or isn't flowing. And when it pauses and you are waiting for something its usually something interesting, because you wern't expecting it to pause just then.

Re:did you checked the video?

[nmr_andrew]

No status bar. No tabs under the URL bar. That's the opposite to the way I like it.

100% agree with you. I have no problem with anyone who prefers it this way, was mildly annoyed when they changed the defaults somewhere in the early 20s version wise, but at least it was a configurable preference (for those who can type about:config at least) up through FF28. It's not so much that someone decided to change it, although there is a problem with change for the sake of change (see: new Coke).

FWIW, if anyone hasn't found it already, the "Classic Theme Restorer" add-on "fixes" the changes by allowing at least some of them to be set, in particular the two quoted above. For now, until someone decides that we shouldn't have that choice at all and Firefox completes the transformation into Chrome.

Re:did you checked the video?

[nmr_andrew]

Some extensions would display things there and that's about it.

Exactly one of the things that drove me nuts about this release until I found an extension to restore the status bar. There are quite a few extensions that put things in the status bar that are otherwise not particularly interactive, if at all. So if there's no status bar, and the main toolbar is full, and the main window is displaying page content, where, pray tell, are these extensions supposed to put things? IMO, it at least partially defeats the purpose of having plugins. I have no problem with being able to toggle the status bar off if that floats your boat, or even making hidden the default, but what purpose is served by eliminating it other than fulfilling some devs desire for a "clean" interface?

Re:did you checked the video?

[nmr_andrew]

I don't care what the default is to be honest; as long as it respects my choice once i've made it. Removing the option entirely is the problem.

If I hadn't already commented, I'd mod you up for this. You've stated the problem clearly and succinctly.

Re:did you checked the video?

[nmr_andrew]

...back/forward separated and arbitrarily movable...

Well, sort of. I can't seem to move them in any way that puts any other icon between them and the URL box. Other than that, I'll echo that this addon is about the only thing that makes FF29 useable. Not sure what I'll switch to if they keep Chrome-ifying FF.

Re:did you checked the video?

[WinterSolstice]

I constantly feel bad when the future I hoped and dreamed of as a kid becomes a shabby second-hand sort of reality.

This new UX fashion is like skinny jeans - it's not something I want, it's not something I get, and I just want everyone off my lawn :D

Re:did you checked the video?

[cavebison]

Firefox has joined the growing list of applications that can never be updated because the new version sucks.

Yes it can.. update to PaleMoon. :) It's based on Firefox, but the devs seem more sane. It even has a 64-bit version.

Re:did you checked the video?

[toddestan]

Hey, the Fit still more or less sticks to the Honda formula. I will give them some credit for the current Accord - it may be bloated, but by 2014 standards it's a relatively clean looking design with decent visibility and headroom, and they've so far resisted the temptation to slap a ridiculous grill on it. On the downside if you want a manual you're limited to a small selection of very dull colors (seriously Honda?).

Now, if they put the third generation back into production I'd buy one tomorrow.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Khopesh]

But part of me wonders if I'm missing the point, if they're so intent on breaking it then might I as well just move browsers now? If I'm having to rely on addons to make a browser work then am I not just sat precariously one step away from Mozilla deciding that addon is unacceptable and cancelling it anyway?

It appears the FF devs have forgotten that their main advantage over Chrome is addons. I have so many addons, with icons to control them in the status bar (addons bar) that the new FF gave me about an inch of locationbar to see URLs. Thanks guys. I reverted this by using the dev version of Status-4-Evar. The GP's mention of Classic Theme Restorer is interesting, but I worry about its compatibility with Tab Mix Plus and other addons, as well as to your point of perhaps trying the new look & feel.

Re:did you checked the video?

[DeadSea]

But then why is the bookmarks bar below the URL bar. My bookmarks are more like the menu. They don't change based on which tab is open. Shouldn't the bookmarks go above the tabs?

Re:did you checked the video?

[UltraZelda64]

I actually love the lack of status bar. I can see more of the page. It has allowed me to see more of the page while still spending vertical space on a title bar, menu bar and the desktop environment's panels.

Meanwhile, I despise the lack of the ability to use small icons any more. It allowed me to see more of the page, since the beginning of Firefox's existance. And now, Mozilla seems to feel the need that smaller icons and many other customization features are unnecessary, and as a result I can't fucking do shit with this atrocious release. Just when you think Firefox can't possibly get any worse, that Mozilla's mastered the art of turning their browser to shit, they impress yet again with feature removal after feature removal, all while still saying, "go find an add-on!" Seriously, there needs to be a Mozilla equivalent to RTFM; how about go "FAFE" (Find A Fucking Extension)?

Re:did you checked the video?

[UltraZelda64]

By... removing it? That's an improvement? If it's poor code, why not just, you know... rewrite or improve it, instead of gutting it completely? Oh yeah, because only the clueless matter to Mozilla anymore.

Re:did you checked the video?

[mcswell]

"... the original Office ribbon, guess what is back?" The menu? I wish. That change alone made me switch to OpenOffice (now LibreOffice) at home. No such luck at work. After four years or more with the Ribbon, I still can't find things I need, and it still has all that junk I never use. Yeah, I know, this is old stuff...

Re:did you checked the video?

[mcswell]

Or tail fins on cars in the late 50s.

Re:did you checked the video?

[Badooleoo]

This one works: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

This is worth a read to get Firefox back to sane: http://www.dedoimedo.com/compu...

Re:did you checked the video?

[Badooleoo]

That and a few other things: http://www.dedoimedo.com/compu...

Re:did you checked the video?

[Hognoxious]

Wrong. The thing with actual sciency stuff in it is called "ergonomics" or, in some places, "human factors engineering".

Analogy: interior design versus architecture.

Unless you change it

[sjbe]

Yeah if I wanted a browser with no conventional pull-down menus and no title bar I'd use Chrome.

So enable the pull downs and title bar. They're still there and still available. I'm using it that way now.

Re:Unless you change it

[Control-Z]

That's good to know, nice that's an option.

Re:Unless you change it

[dstyle5]

Not a UI/UX designer so I have to ask, why have designers hidden these basic menus in most browsers these days? Is it because they want their browser to be "cleaner" by default? For me the 20 or so pixels that are saved by hiding the menu bar isn't worth the inconvenience of always having to turn these menus back on. I can't recall anyone I know mentioning how they hate the file menu and wish it were hidden by default on a PC.

Re:Unless you change it

[Anonymous Coward]

why have designers hidden these basic menus in most browsers these days?

Because HDTV ruined our computer monitors. They have no vertical space anymore.

Re:Unless you change it

[houstonbofh]

Not a UI/UX designer so I have to ask, why have designers hidden these basic menus in most browsers these days? Is it because they want their browser to be "cleaner" by default? For me the 20 or so pixels that are saved by hiding the menu bar isn't worth the inconvenience of always having to turn these menus back on. I can't recall anyone I know mentioning how they hate the file menu and wish it were hidden by default on a PC.

If they actually cared what users did with it we would never have had, KDE 4, Unity, Gnome Shell, Windows 8, and so on... They simply don't care how you use it. They are alone in their echo chamber looking at the new shiny, going "Ohh... We should do that." Then they wonder why they are suddenly abandon and running out of money. http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Re:Unless you change it

[jader3rd]

Not a UI/UX designer so I have to ask, why have designers hidden these basic menus in most browsers these days? Is it because they want their browser to be "cleaner" by default?

It's because they create beautiful websites, and know that the web is beautiful. So anything that interferes with the beauty of a website should be removed. The more websites you see, the more beauty you enjoy.

Re:Unless you change it

[VortexCortex]

Not a UI/UX designer so I have to ask, why have designers hidden these basic menus in most browsers these days?

Three reasons:
0. The concept of a virtual display larger than the current view is not applied universally.
1. Head and eye tracking are not yet standard features.
2. They care more about aesthetics than usability, but are primitive monkeys stuck in the realm of static 2D UI designs.

In my UI experiments, I'm able keep ALL menu bars and etc. options stuff off screen. As you move your pointer, or eyes, or head closer to an edge I scroll the UI view-port down to reveal the features -- It's constantly active and thus fully discoverable and most folks don't even notice that the options aren't there when they're not looking at it unless they sit too far away or use the mouse so they can stare at the top/bottom/side and move the mouse to watch the screen reveal more options along the edges of the view. With my high res 3D glasses and head tracking on this system allows me to have MORE than a full 360 degree UI -- With gradual recentering I don't have to think about craning my neck about strangely to access it all either.

If you want a quick and dirty example, get access to a WM with Compize or Emerald (or Compize Fusion) etc. HW compositing, turn on the whole screen zoom feature, maximize a window then place the mouse at the center of your screen and zoom in just a bit until you can't see the tabs and other window dressing. Now, move your mouse up, Peekaboo! Move it towards where the scroll bar should be: TADA! There it is. Move it back towards the center: It's like auto-hide, but reveals the UI world slowly so you don't have to pause and take in the new information that just sprang into existence -- It's more like your vision system naturally works.

Now zoom in just a bit more for effect. Notice how when you move the cursor towards a button the button also moves towards the cursor? Watch the mouse as you move it around, and note that more of the screen comes into view the more you shift your focus towards the edges... Now imagine that without the giant buttons and blurriness. Bonus, no more screen burn in of the OS status bars. Add head or eye tracking and you can decouple such whole-screen scrolling movement from the mouse, or leave it active to multiply the effect (but this causes motion sickness in some folks). Protip: clipping data to flat 2D boxes is unnecessary and stenciling is more expensive than compositing with alpha attenuation.

I've been using such "virtual desktop" features via custom graphics & input drivers since Win98, now I just have nifty computer-vision and VR/AR gear to accentuate it with. I have double blink to change focus, and I fucking love it because I can double blink while looking at "submit" then press enter without reaching for a mouse or trying to memorize the tab orders of every user interface on earth. To me lots of crazy things like lean to see other workspaces, and Shift+Space to select the focus once the "focus cursor" is where you want it -- not the same as the "activation cursor" (traditional mouse cursor) -- or Ctrl+Space to bring up the controls for a given space (moving, sizing, selecting, etc)... or Alt Space to, [ahem], Alter the Space and its contents...Ctrl+Enter to control the entering of input... etc. Yeah, like most Emacs or Vi users I don't even like moving my hand from the typing position to the F1-F12 keys, arrow keys or even insert / home / PgUp etc. keys, numpad is nice for long 10-key numeric entry though.

HOWEVER I would NEVER add head tracking, double blink to click or remove Home / End / PgUp or F1, etc. other vast changes to features in my public facing user interfaces! Folks would be surprised and confused about why the focus keeps jumping around, or what that faint glow is that's following their eye movements in "training" mode, and especially why lists and boxes don't have framing containers, and keep collapsing when you look at something else. To me it's natura

Re:Unless you change it

[nabsltd]

For me the 20 or so pixels that are saved by hiding the menu bar isn't worth the inconvenience of always having to turn these menus back on.

I don't understand how hiding the menu bar saves any pixels.

There are so few top-level menu items, that you can easily place the URL bar right beside the menu bar and still have plenty of room for both. Below that, I have the search box and various shortcut icons on the next row, with tabs below that. Although you can strip down the UI, I can't see how you can not leave room for some combination of what I use, at least for the vast majority of people.

Other people might not have the search box displayed, but they also might have a lot more bookmark shortcut icons than I do. I also can't see any way that hiding the URL bar is useful, so you need room for that. Maybe you could get by with one row of toolbars, but you'd be pretty stripped down.

Re:Unless you change it

[oogoliegoogolie]

So many things are designed with form-over-function nowadays, nobody likes it, yet they blindly continue on.
I would say that the new UI designers come from smartphone or tablet backgrounds where screen real estate is at a premium so they have to hide all the borders, menus, buttons and such, and when they switch to designing desktop applications they seem to forget they are no longer working on a 5" screen and what works on mobile devices does not work on the desktop most of the time.

Even Apple started doing dumb things like hiding 'Save-As' and replacing it with a stupidly dumb absurd 'Duplicate' command that takes three times as many clicks to do a 'Save-As', reversing 20+ years of scrolling direction with their so-called Natural Scrolling, and hiding scroll-bars on 2560x1440 screens in order to save 10 pixels.

I like FF, but this redesign may be too much if I cannot restore it ALL back to before. At least there is still SeaMonkey.

Re:Unless you change it

[A Friendly Troll]

So enable the pull downs and title bar. They're still there and still available. I'm using it that way now.

How?

Where's the option?

Re:Unless you change it

[KuanHon]

Go into Customise, on the bottom left hand side you can click Title Bar to get back the title bar, and the Show/Hide Toolbars dropdown allows you to enable the Menu bar.

No combined address/search bar?

[rolfwind]

Then I'm not interested. Seriously, chrome has gotten me way to lazy in this regard. And FF has frustrated me on this since (and yes, I know there is an add-on).

Re:No combined address/search bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Combined address and search is a terrible idea that should have been taken out behind the woodshed and shot years ago. Search in the address bar is like making DNS cache poisoning a browser feature.

Re:No combined address/search bar?

[vux984]

Then I'm not interested. Seriously, chrome has gotten me way to lazy in this regard.

Maybe not all of us want every single thing we type into the address bar sent to google or bing?

Re:No combined address/search bar?

[RJFerret]

Heck no, why do you think Chrome is avoided?

No sympathy for complainers, especially those who are aware there are add-ons that do what they want, but invest energy in a complaint rather than having their customizable tools perform how they desire. That's not being lazy, that's being obstinate. Lazy is not capitalizing "Chrome" or including all the letters in the word "too". One would imagine you, of all people, would know the difference! ;-)

Re:No combined address/search bar?

[koan]

I agree, how about a different approach... let the *user* choose, frankly I'm tired of having software ducks making my UI choices for me.

Re:No combined address/search bar?

[TheCarp]

Thats funny because I found not only that firefox does this by default....but I can thankfully disable this terrible feature. The one thing I have NEVER EVER wanted when I type into an address bar....is to have it do a search. In fact, if I type in a url and its an error....I just want the motherfucking error thanks. Please do NOT do a search and whatever you do....do NOT forward me to a new URL and deny me the ability to edit the one I just typed in.

Re:No combined address/search bar?

[Kisame217]

Huh.Looks like having 4-5 search engines doesn't interest you.

Re:No combined address/search bar?

[freeze128]

and they took the bookmark button out of the address (awesome) bar and made it into its own control. Now, the awesome bar is a little less awesome.

Re:No combined address/search bar?

[bughunter]

Combined address and search is a terrible idea

Agreed. Does EVERY generation of commercial software designers* have to re-learn the hazards of conflating instructions with data?

A search term is data. A url is an address/instruction. FFS, don't try to combine the two!

__
*Cause you know for damn sure these constant unnecessary UI updates aren't pushed by code developers. It's all marketing and people who feel like they constantly have to leave a visible mark in order to justify their existence.

Re:No combined address/search bar?

[Reziac]

I dunno what FF does, but in SeaMonkey, I have an address bar, and a Search button. If I type in the address bar and hit Enter, it goes to the domain (no need to type in the pesky www. or .com). If instead I click Search, it goes to Google and search happens. This saves me the bother of having a Google bookmark... for that I have StartPage.

SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[lesincompetent]

FF (as well as JavaScript, that shit) needs heavier multi-process and multi-threading in this day and age of multicore, multithreaded CPUs.
I switched to chromium just for that. FF just feels much more ponderous.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[lesincompetent]

Too little, but most importantly TOO LATE.

Re:Don't care

[Anonymous Coward]

After "pushing out their CEO" for political / free speach reasons

Free speach [sic], you say? Obligatory xkcd. The CEO has a Constitution-enshrined right to say whatever he wants without fear of criminal prosecution, but Mozilla also has a right to boot him out of the company for it.

It has a combined address/search bar

[sjbe]

You can search in the address bar. I do it all the time. No special add-ons needed either. It will search your default search engine very similar to Chrome. Why they have an additional search bar I don't really know. I never use it because I don't need to.

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[Anonymous Coward]

I disabled the search in address bar because of typos are then searched. I don't want that. If i need to search something, i use the searchbar in which i can also easily choose the search engine.

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[_bug_]

Type a single-word search query into the address bar in Firefox. Instead of searching for the word right away the browser attempts a DNS lookup. With the search bar that DNS lookup step is removed. For the more privacy-conscious this is an important thing. Especially if you've got an ISP that redirects a failed DNS response to their own search engine.

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[shabble]

You can search in the address bar.

Sorta - if your favorite/memory-muscle way of searching for stuff on websites is specifying the website first, then I'm fairly certain that searching for (e.g.) site:slashdot.org firefox will not give you what you'd get in the search bar in 29 - I'm seem to recall getting bitten by it in 29 way back when I couldn't figure out how to get the search bar to be visible (reset the UI was the solution) - it's certainly still broken in 31.

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[houghi]

You don't, but I do. I do not have a 'default' search engine that I use. The ones I use are google, google images(1), KickAssTorrent, ImDB, Debian Packages, ThePirateBay, Wikipedia and a pron search engine.

So to me a search is not always the same thing I am searchning for. Guessing, I would say Google itself would be 3 or 4 in what I use.

This is not saying what I do is worse or better. It is just explaining why they have an additional search bar, as you did not know.

(1) I have added &sout=1&tbs=isz:lt,islt:4mp to the search result, so I get images that are large enough to be wallpapers and shown in the old fashioned way,

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[clickety6]

You can search in the address bar.

You can piss in a sink too... doesn't mean using one facility for two different functions is a good thing.

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[drinkypoo]

You can search in the address bar. I do it all the time. No special add-ons needed either. It will search your default search engine very similar to Chrome.

Not here. It searches whichever search engine I have selected, just like the search box right next to it. If I didn't type URLs directly I could just turn off the fucking address bar.

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[Mathieu Lu]

You can also use custom keywords with Bookmarks:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Usin...

I alias google to "g", so when I want to search, i just type in the location bar: "g these are my search terms".

It's also practical to do Google searches in specific languages. For example, I use "ge" for google-english, "gf" for google-french, etc.

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[BZ]

The search bar is there for a simple reason. It's to allow a place to do searches with search autosuggest without sending every single URL you type to the search provider.

Chrome adopts the "send all the URLs the user types to the search provider" approach by default, unsurprisingly.

Of course if you don't care about the search autosuggest feature, you can just customize away the search bar.

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[dkman]

Mod up. Somebody's telling it like it is.
IMO, I don't need a "Search bar". I can easily type google and hit ctrl+enter (a combo nobody else seems to use) or type goo and hit down then enter (since it's generally right there in my history).
I recently typed an address in a browser (don't remember which, but let's say "slashdot.org" in IE) and got search results, then clicked the link to slashdot to go there. Do I need to say how ridiculous this seemed?
There was a slashdot article a month or so ago saying that Google was down for 10 minutes and discussed how much the world's internet traffic dropped, partially because people search for the site they are looking for then click it. It had not occurred to me that people even wanted to do that. That's what bookmarks are for.

On a side note I recently had a run in with the hidden addons in Chrome that caused me a few hours of frustration. One of the things I like about FireFox is that it doesn't (or from the sounds of it "didn't") hide my addon icons.
I just recently stopped used Download Status Bar, but I love that addon. When people were complaining about the download arrow that replaced the download window I didn't get it because I used the addon and wasn't affected.
I'm starting to feel like it's a "first they came for the Jews" situation. I was not a fan of the first Chromification changes, but didn't care too much, but now it sounds like we're sliding down that slope.

I haven't loaded it yet, but from some of the comments I wonder if I'd care too much. I on 28 My tabs are on the top, then I have 2 bars (1 with address, addons, and navigation. The second is the bookmark bar). At the bottom I have the status bar and noscript popup bar above that.
I know at one time the tabs were below the address bar, but I couldn't tell you when that changed. To play devil's advocate I could say there's an aspect of "adapt or die", but in my heart the state of software often seems to be a "change for changes sake" rather than change for some purpose.

Do you think I used enough anecdotal blurbs?

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[whois]

If you begin a search with the question mark it doesn't do a DNS lookup, it just sends it straight to search.

So searching for:

?these are my search terms

does what you want.

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[excelsior_gr]

Are you a legitimate retard, or a fucking troll?

The address bar is for URLs, the search bar is for search terms and expressions. Two fucking different things. Also, fuck the default search engine. I want to be able to switch between search engines. Currently I have google, en.wikipedia, de.wikipedia, two dictionaries, imdb, youtube and some other search engines in the drop-down list.

You don't need to use the search bar, because you are an idiot.

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[Mathieu Lu]

Didn't know that. Thanks for the tip!

Re: It has a combined address/search bar

[tangent]

At least they don't commit the inverse problem, where a single word is blindly assumed to be a search term just because it doesn't contain a dot or slash.

Chrome, Safari and IE all commit that UX sin, which is really annoying when you're trying to go to an internal LAN web server by name.

Chrome and IE let you hack around this by appending a slash (e.g. "myserver/") but Safari doesn't. You end up creating bookmarks purely to avoid having to type the FQDN or explicitly prepend "http://"

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[dotancohen]

You can piss in a sink too... doesn't mean using one facility for two different functions is a good thing.

I brush my teeth in the toilet, you insensitive clod!

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[dotancohen]

I brush my teeth in the toilet, you insensitive clod!

As a Firefox UI designer could you shed some light on your process for the recent redesign?

Sure, the recent Firefox redesign is simply full of... toothpaste.

Re:It has a combined address/search bar

[robsku]

Search engines can be chosen by prefixing the search terms with a keyword assigned to search engine using the address field. Defining/changing the keywords can be done from search field's dropdown menu. I prefer single letter's (like g for google, s for startpage.com, y for youtube, etc.) or short strings (like trans for translate.google.com). To search startpage.com for "google search engine" I would enter "s google search engine" in the address field.

Newer used awesomebar so I have no idea if it messes up with this behavior or not but it's the default firefox functionality (and has been for long time, I've used it at least from 3.5), though it seems there are many here who don't know this (and some of them fairly fould mouthed in their being mistaken - not you though and I'm happy to help :) ). I would personally remove the whole search field from the UI (I don't mean like "if I was charge of firefox", just from my own system) if I knew how to access managing search engines without it.

All lies

[Anonymous Coward]

These: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=13350353&sid=cee01d7621130bd32543a5154b4419c9#p13350353

Re:All lies

[Ducho_CWB]

These: http://forums.mozillazine.org/...

One can summarize as
"The Firefox has been REMOVED. You will have to find an add-on that restores functionality."

Re: All lies

[DVega]

Firefox changed "A" to "X", and instead of saying: "A" was better because all these reasons, you are saying: Where is my "A"? How can I restore "A" again? These are not valid objections.

Re: All lies

[0111 1110]

Actually I think you are missing the point. The case that B is better than A should have been made by the devs already. I don't believe they have made their case for most of those removed features. The burden to show how these features are better is on them not. They are the ones making the claim that they are better.

As we all know by now the real reason for these changes are not because they are better but because they are different and more to the point because it is more like Chrome, the browser that the Firefox dev team has wet dreams about every night. This is just more of the same and the evasiveness about removing the tabs on bottom is typical of the Mozilla team.

I used to like Firefox because it was different from the other browsers and I liked those differences. and of course for the extensions and themes. The ones that the dev team keeps breaking many times permanently due to the insanity of the Rapid Release religion. The time is fast approaching that I may as well just install Chrome instead. Why settle for a bad copy when you can have the original? Seriously if they take away tabs on bottom and the ability to create sequential rows of tabs I will finally dump firefox for good.

Re:All lies

[rtb61]

Yep, installed the update and Firefox toolbars went nuts, completely unusable, message in that, watch out for installed themes and preferably remove them. Once the default is theme running and you can see what you are doing, if your into the classic look, like the grumpy old man I am, then add https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... and chill. All is good and still customisable and you can go back to peacefully drifting across the internet promoting that ever so desirable brain chemical flow.

Re: All lies

[hobarrera]

My valid reason for criticizing the "hamburger button" instead of the firefox button, is that now I have a very hard time telling firefox and chrome apart.

That's not how it should ebhave

[Anonymous Coward]

That may be a bug or a malfunctioning/misbehaving add-on: try standard diagnostics: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diagnostic_-_Firefox

Re:That's not how it should ebhave

[opusbuddy]

Maybe. Started happening though right after a fresh install of 28. Pretty much just a clean AdBlock, Flashblock; no Greasemonkey, etc. No issues flagged with any plugins when upgrading to 29.

Re:That's not how it should ebhave

[opusbuddy]

Nope, even with everything turned off, still happens. I put a feedback in on the Mozilla page.

Re:That's not how it should ebhave

[Kinematics]

It's this issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

Been around a long time, but seems almost impossible to reproduce reliably, so no clue what's causing it.

No, just NO.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop redecorating my desktop. If I wanted a browser that looks like Chrome, I would install Chrome. If I wanted a browser that looks like it's meant to be used on a touch screen (just where did that menu of icons come from...), I would use a tablet. This is my NON-TOUCH DESKTOP you're ruining.

Why does everybody seem hellbent on killing the traditional desktop? Are you bored? Running out of bugs to fix?

Stop moving things around! Every time you do that, I lose something that I've become accustomed to for no good reason at all. That's like moving a table a couple of inches, making me bump into it for a couple weeks, and then you change it some more. Or changing the height of the stair steps. Don't do that. It's at best irritating.

I am seriously fed up with this shit.

Re:No, just NO.

[houstonbofh]

Stop moving things around! Every time you do that, I lose something that I've become accustomed to for no good reason at all. That's like moving a table a couple of inches, making me bump into it for a couple weeks, and then you change it some more. Or changing the height of the stair steps. Don't do that. It's at best irritating.

Picture a car where every few years they moved the gearshift and the turn signal. Sometimes to the old places for each. I can't see anything bad happening there...

Re:No, just NO.

[0111 1110]

Actually a better analogy would be some smartypants removing your gearshift lever entirely and putting it in random places. Every. Fucking. Night. Why? Because he can and because he likes fucking with you.

Re:No, just NO.

[CauseBy]

Yeah, but that same guy is waiting next to your old car each morning, asking you if you want to change to a new car. He doesn't always tell you what he's going to change, but you don't trust him because you didn't like yesterday's change. In this scenario, that makes you an nincompoop for agreeing to take the new car again.

If you like your old car, don't get a new car. This is obvious.

Re:No, just NO.

[0111 1110]

No. It's the same car. He just keeps telling you it's new. He's lied to you about everything so far and is actively trying to trick you. So should you trust him this time?

And do you consider the fact that no matter what you say he makes the change anyway no matter how much you protest. He says it's for your own good. He tells you he's done studies. And besides Ford is paying him to do all this. If he stops he'll lose all that cash.

Re:No, just NO.

[cavebison]

I am seriously fed up with this shit.

As are many others, you're not alone. I'd recommend PaleMoon then, it's based on Firefox but the devs seem more sane. It even has a 64-bit version. Better than SeaMonkey IMO.

Re:No, just NO.

[houstonbofh]

But everywhere I go, the parking attendants say my car is too old to be allowed in...

Re:No, just NO.

[perryizgr8]

if chrome took ideas from australis and implemented them before australis was released, well kudos to chrome! they show how an efficient team should work. and shame on firefox, for copying every single ui element from chrome, and taking so long to do that, too!

woo

[vux984]

The tabs are sleek and smooth to help you navigate the Web faster.

Well that's a fucking relief. I've been slogging awa with these slightly squarer tabs for months and my productivity has been in the toilet as a result.

Seriously, do they have any actual metrics that the new tabs actually help anyone "navigate the web faster" ?

Itâ(TM)s easy to see what tab youâ(TM)re currently visiting

It was already easy.

and the other tabs fade into the background to be less of a distraction when youâ(TM)re not using them.

Tweaking the relative brightness between current and other tabs hardly counts as revolutionary. I'm indifferent at best.

The Firefox menu has moved to the right corner of the toolbar and puts all your browser controls in one place.

I get how this different, but how is this, in any way 'better'?

I can't wait for this to get into cars. Who doesn't want a perfectly empty dashboard with all the controls crammed into the right corner.

In all seriousness, whoop-dee-doo so they moved the top left menu to the top right, but now its got that newish 3 bar icon which has come to mean "we stuck the menu here".

I guess people who heretofore have only ever used a twitter app will will finally be able to find the firefox menu that had been eluding them, hidden away in the top left.

The menu includes a âoeCustomizeâ tool that transforms Firefox into a powerful customization mode where you can add or move any feature, service or add-on.'

All it needs is to say "Don't Panic!" in large friendly letters.

Re:woo

[koan]

Rounded tabs help you get through the Internet tubes faster.

Re:woo

[vux984]

ou're right. They should have stopped at the previous version

Never said that. I merely said 'whoop-dee-doo'.

Damn progression! Who cares if most consumers are drawn to a minimalist interface. We want it to look the same. Forever.

So provide it as yet another skin. Make it the new default for new installs even.

Its not really any better or worse than the old one... but it does make it look more like chrome if that's the itch you wanted to scratch.

I'm not mocking them because I prefer the old one, I'm mocking them because they said idiotic fluff like "Rounded tabs that make navigating the web faster"

I don't really care one way or the other about the new look. But the features they made a big to-do about should have just been another skin.

Re:woo

[vic.tz]

I am no longer able to move the refresh button to the left of the toolbar. They removed the option to use small icons. And the new menu button hijacked the spot I used to put my cookie manager.

So, going from 28 to 29 cost me the ability to customize the toolbar the way I please (ootb). That's a pretty expensive update...

Re:woo

[trawg]

Tweaking the relative brightness between current and other tabs hardly counts as revolutionary. I'm indifferent at best.

Actually after using FF29 for a few hours I am finding it really frustrating - I feel like I used to be able to easily glance at my other tabs to find the one I was looking for.

Now they all sort of gel together and are less 'distinct'. Maybe it's a weird "I'm not used to it yet" thing but I feel like having lots of tabs open is a little more confusing now than it was before.

Maybe they did some usability studies where they measured tab-finding-response-time and after a bit of use it got lower? Otherwise I can't figure out why this change exists.

Re:woo

[bughunter]

I can't wait for this to get into cars. Who doesn't want a perfectly empty dashboard with all the controls crammed into the right corner.

It's already in my fucking car. I went to go buy an aftermarket stereo "upgrade" and every goddamned one has all of the options and controls accessed by a menu navigated with one pushbutton knob. Not a single choice was available with the [enter] and [exit] command functions on separate controls from the [select/scroll] functions.

That's right. Want to change the time and date, press the knob, then spin the same knob until you get to SYSTEM (not SETUP or FUNCTIONS mind you), then press the button again to select TIME SET, then again to set the hour, spin it until the hour is set, then press it again, then spin it to set... and oh shit you hit a bump and pressed the knob accidentally so you're advancing the AM/PM now, exit all the way to the SYSTEM menu and start over...

It's the same way with things you need to access frequently: audio quality controls, station settings, etc. They're all buried two or three layers deep in a menu accessed by this press/twist control that is very easy to accidentally bump. And if you aren't watching what you're doing, a single bump will activate one of the options (RFDS?) that resets every fucking station preset to the factory defaults. (If you've seen someone on CA-101 suddenly scream at his car stereo and trying not to smash the faceplate in rage, that was me or another Pioneer customer.)

In addition to being susceptible to bumps (unheard of in a moving vehicle, right?) you can't dead reckon -- and you can't see what the next/previous selection is going to be. You have to constantly keep your eyes on the display not the road. And the fucking things are all so dim you need a second hand to shade the display from the sun, so now you're using both hands and both eyes to operate the goddamn radio.

It's the shittiest idea to come along in user interface design since the god forsaken Office 2007 toolbars. Worse.

I think the same pissant who worked on the Office UI team in the mid-2000's went to work for Pioneer shortly thereafter. He wasn't finished fucking with people's heads.

Now, apparently, he's at Mozilla.

Re:woo

[TangoMargarine]

You're right. They should have stopped at the previous version.

No, they *should've* stopped at 3.6 or 4. People in hell want out; they'll settle for water.

Damn progression! Who cares if most consumers are drawn to a minimalist interface.

A) I want to see those metrics.
B) Most consumers are idiots.
C) I don't own a tablet. Stop ramming tablet interfaces down my throat.

We want it to look the same. Forever.

Damn straight. I know how it already works. Are you a Ribbon fan, too? Or Unity?

Re:woo

[0111 1110]

You're right. They should have stopped at the previous version. Damn progression!

They should have stopped before they decided to stop improving an existing browser and start just blindly copying everything Chrome does. I'm guessing you are not old enough to remember this, but before version 4.0 every release was not about complaining. Admittedly slashdot posts about a new firefox version were a lot less interesting and had fewer comments, but the changes tended to be relatively sane and if there was a bit of craziness thrown in at least it wasn't the sort that utterly destroys the browser so that Chrome users can have the option of a very slightly different browser that works just like they are used to. It's almost like Google is paying for these changes.

Re:woo

[perryizgr8]

and the other tabs fade into the background to be less of a distraction when youâ(TM)re not using them.

multiple extensions were able to do this, long ago. and with more customization too.

The Firefox menu has moved to the right corner of the toolbar and puts all your browser controls in one place.

the logic is: it's better because it's identical to chrome.

The menu includes a âoeCustomizeâ tool that transforms Firefox into a powerful customization mode where you can add or move any feature, service or add-on.'

this "customization mode" is a joke. it's just a super watered-down version of the customize toolbars feature. it has about a 10th of the functionality, but cool pretty animations and cute gridlines.

PS: tab mix plus features don't work properly with tree style tabs anymore. the last thing i was holding on was because i loved to have a vertical tabbar and set double click on tab bar to open a new tab. and its gone. and i dunno whose fault it is. but since the breakage happened with the 29 update, i am inclined to believe it was mozilla, and not the extension authors (who have always been the value adders for firefox, imo).

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[Mumford]

I'm not a fan of the new firefox UI, but

> Ah, the days of having to wait weeks to upgrade until my addons did.

This, along with the standard "Firefox uses too much memory", have not been even slightly relevant for years now. Firefox solved those particular issues, thanks mainly due to competition from Chrome.

Re:Don't care

[Nutria]

So what pure-as-the-driven-snow browser did you install? Epiphany? Links2? Konq?

tabs on bottom have been removed

[postmortem]

Well agenda to force tabs on top (next to title bar) upon all users has won... you no longer even have option to move them between address bar and web content. Last few versions had at least configuration option buried in about:config. Maybe not a big deal, but to me it requires more mouse movement from content to tab switching - which is opposite of what good UI design is.

Forcing bad UI to users : how did it work for Microsoft, Mozilla?

Re:tabs on bottom have been removed

[houstonbofh]

Forcing bad UI to users : how did it work for Microsoft, Mozilla?

And KDE4... And Gnome... http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Lots of object lessons for those who care to look.

Re:tabs on bottom have been removed

[gnupun]

Well agenda to force tabs on top (next to title bar) upon all users has won... you no longer even have option to move them between address bar and web content.

If a private corp did this, it would be okay since the boss calls the shots and if you don't like it, move to a competitor's product.

But a so-called community product like Firefox should be controlled by the public. Who are the secret little fascists that are deciding what should be added or changed without the approval of users? All Firefox changes (new features/changing existing features), except bug fixes, should go through a community vote before being implemented. Is this a fair request?

Re:tabs on bottom have been removed

[quixote9]

It might be a bit cumbersome to have that process for all changes. But I couldn't agree more about the principle of the thing. FOSS is supposed to give control to the user.

Not to the marketing department. Not to ad space. Not funneling users toward trackers. Not even puffing up some dev's ego.

Re:tabs on bottom have been removed

[Gavagai80]

There was nothing seriously wrong with the KDE 4 UI, it was the fact that they released it before they'd implemented most of the KDE 3 features that upset people.

Re:tabs on bottom have been removed

[houstonbofh]

That fact that is was lacking in functionality is something seriously wrong in my book. And apparently a lot of others as well.

Re:tabs on bottom have been removed

[Gavagai80]

It was seriously wrong, yes, but it wasn't really a UI issue.

Re:Don't care

[Nutria]

No, actually, they don't. In CA labor law, it's illegal to fire someone for donating to a political cause.

Use Pale Moon instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a fork of FF engine with the older interface (from around version 26 I believe).

Re:Use Pale Moon instead.

[rudy_wayne]

It's a fork of FF engine with the older interface (from around version 26 I believe).

I think Palemoon is based on version 24 which is the latest Extended Service Release, and he is selectively patching in bug fixes and security updates but leaving out the big UI changes. I've been using it for a couple of months now and it works fine.

Re:Use Pale Moon instead.

[houstonbofh]

It's a fork of FF engine with the older interface (from around version 26 I believe).

http://www.palemoon.org/
I would love to see that website hit rate stats over the next few weeks... :)
Note, A Linux versions exists, but is hard to find. http://www.palemoon.org/contri...

Re:Use Pale Moon instead.

[alexo]

Several add-ons that I use do not support Pale Moon

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[gstoddart]

This, along with the standard "Firefox uses too much memory", have not been even slightly relevant for years now. Firefox solved those particular issues, thanks mainly due to competition from Chrome.

Oh, when did Firefox (or Chome, or Safari) fix the issue of using too much memory?

In my experience, all three of them gradually grow over time, suck up more and more memory, and eventually need to be restarted to reset them back to something sane.

I hate to break it to you, but in my experience, this complaint has been more than slightly relevant for years now.

I currently have twice as many chrome.exe processes running as I do open tabs, and closing tabs doesn't always seem to free memory.

Firefox gets bigger when it's sitting idle, as does Safari, as does Chrome.

So I have no idea of what you're basing this notion that they don't consume too much memory comes from. Because it sure as heck doesn't match what I see.

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[gerf]

They still break addons. Just look for Download Status Bar.

Re:Don't care

[Trailer Trash]

Only directly firing him would have been illegal. Raising a scandal across the web and making life miserable for him until he resigns is perfectly fine and is what happened.

If by "Perfectly fine" you mean "legal", then, yes. But "morally and ethically proper" is a different concept.

Calling your mother a whore and you a bastard might be legal, but it's not something polite people do.

Re:Heresy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Change is progress. Art is functionality.

From TFA:

Nightingale told TNW the single menu not only makes using Firefox simpler, but it actually brings the browser closer to a mobile UI, which helps the team develop the app across platforms.

There.

That's the real reason UX people have destroyed this industry. Mobile has been where the money is for the past couple of years. Develop the UX designed to be used by large-pawed morons, and backport to desktop.

It's why a grid of 10 icons and 2 blank spaces that can't be scanned as rapidly as a compact menu of text items is somehow "better".

UX people aren't trying to make the product easier to use. That's just a lie they tell themselves to make their own fucking jobs easier.

It's why websites where you used to hit PgDn or the spacebar to page through content no longer work - some UX fucktard has to put position:fixed into the CSS, so that -- remember, these are the same fucktards who told us we didn't need a status bar to save precious vertical space -- I can see a big static red bar saying "TIME Magazine" or a big black "NYTIMES!" logo. Meanwhile, what used to be a single keypress (PgDn or spacebar) is now "PgDn,Uparrow3x to make visible the part that's hiding under the fucking fixed-position-menu.

Fuck all human interface researchers with George Carlins proverbial Big Rubber Dick, then bring us The Shiny.

We went through this during the i18n/l10n wars. Indecipherable glyphs were better than UIs with words. No they weren't. They were cheaper to localize than UIs with word-based menus. Hence the fucking Ribbon.

This, but fuck the shiny too. The browser was done 5 years ago except for security enhancements and Javascript performance.

Bookmark buttons a bad UI change

[_bug_]

The button to quickly bookmark a page, and the button to pull up your list of bookmarks, are now paired together. This is not a good UI design choice. Now when I try to pull up my bookmarks I'm bookmarking pages and vice versa. I wish they were separate. I also wish that the button to bookmark a page was back in the address bar where its position provided better context.

as fast as Chrome?

[globaljustin]

is it anywhere near as fast as Chrome?

Firefox's bookmarks system is infinitely better than Chrome's "pile in the corner" system, but i am one of those that has 150+ tabs open at the same time on occasion and on my machine FF just can't handle that, only Chrome

I used to use Camino...**sigh**

Re:as fast as Chrome?

[NotDrWho]

i am one of those that has 150+ tabs open at the same time on occasion and on my machine FF just can't handle that

Funny, I am one of those "Open in new window" guys who still prefers new windows over tabs. I'm beginning to think I'm the only one.

Re:as fast as Chrome?

[DarwinSurvivor]

What we need are window managers that handle the "tabbing" natively. This whole thing with every application having to implement its own non-standard tab system is completely stupid. Not only will it simplify applications, but they'll also all be the same. Right now the way tabs works is equivalent to every application using a different window decorator with the minimize/close buttons in random places.

Re:as fast as Chrome?

[mugurel]

is it anywhere near as fast as Chrome?

sure, that's what the sleek and smooth tabs are for. jeez, don't you even read rhe summary?

Re:as fast as Chrome?

[danbert8]

It's nice when you want to look at two things on two different screens to have two open windows (I'm looking at you fucking Microsoft Excel and Project). However, I find tabs to be the better organized on a single screen. I hate it when a new window opens up on top of something I was doing and in a random and unpredictable spot.

Re:as fast as Chrome?

[psyclone]

That's why we have ctrl+T or ctrl+N, it's your choice.

Re:as fast as Chrome?

[psyclone]

How could you possibly use Chrome with that many tabs and not have tabs on the side?

I routinely have 50-100 tabs open in Firefox, memory usage is great, even with a bunch of add-ons, from versions 26-28. Granted, some of my add-ons help reduce overall resources by blocking cookies and scripts. Also 'click to play' is a necessity so Flash only loads on the few sites I allow.

Re:as fast as Chrome?

[globaljustin]

How could you possibly use Chrome with that many tabs and not have tabs on the side [mozilla.org]?

idk...i never thought about it but i really just subconsciously group tabs for a particular task together when I open them

Re:as fast as Chrome?

[bingoUV]

Ok, so presumably another TabKit 2.0 user. Do you have any idea if it works on this latest Firefox? And do you have any way for highlighting the current tab , which stopped working with TabKit about a year ago?

thanks

Re:as fast as Chrome?

[Barefoot Monkey]

What we need are window managers that handle the "tabbing" natively. This whole thing with every application having to implement its own non-standard tab system is completely stupid. Not only will it simplify applications, but they'll also all be the same.

Like Fluxbox? I loved that WM :)

Re:as fast as Chrome?

[Keybounce]

Funny, I am one of those "Open in new window" guys who still prefers new windows over tabs. I'm beginning to think I'm the only one.

My only reasons for wanting tabs over windows?

1. Memory. For some reason, it takes a lot more system resources/memory to have 10 pages in 10 windows, than in 1 window with 10 tabs.

2. I want to keep related pages together. But ohh, Firefox doesn't have any tools for selecting tabs and working with them as a group. I think it was just a couple of changes that were needed: Move all tabs here and to the right off to a new window as a group; and, open all new tabs on the far right (instead of next to me).

3. What we really need, and have never had, is the ability to say "Open all external links in a new window", rather than "in a new tab in the same window". If you have things set up so that command-clicking gives you a new window, then external links open in a new window. But if you have it set to use a new tab for command-click, then external links become a tab in the same window.

If I open new tabs from command-clicking a link, they are probably related and belong in the same group.

If I open 5 tabs, and then close that page, go to the first tab, and read ... and then start clicking: I am now looking at stuff related to the new page, not the old page -- so the tabs I am now opening have the potential to be unrelated to the rest of the tabs already on the bar. If I can say "Group these new tabs, and put them into a new window"? Wonderful. But no -- instead, as I wander the tab bar, I am browsing in stack-order, rather than queue-order, with no way to break the dozens of tabs up into reasonable grouping.

** And, even if I could, doing so drastically increases the system resources/memory usage.

Re:as fast as Chrome?

[psyclone]

I've not yet tried it with FF 29, works great on FF 28.

I've not figured out a way to highlight the current tab, but I use another way to show me which tab I'm on. I disable the close button (X) on all tabs except for the current one, so I can look to the far right of my tab list for the (X) as I have tabs on the right.

With a vertical monitor, my tab width is small, but I can show many tabs without scrolling (about 70 un-collapsed).

If I wanted a Chrome interface, I'd use Chrome

[JDG1980]

I haven't gotten this update yet but it looks like they turned the user interface into a Chrome rip-off.

I am going to be very upset if all of my userChrome customization work breaks as a result of this. I don't want tabs; I want traditional Windows-style menus, not an all-in-one dropdown; I want the toolbar (including Back and Forward buttons) on its own line. A couple of releases ago I had to add some extra userChrome lines so it wouldn't show 1 useless tab, because they removed the setting for that. And now these genius "UI designers" are screwing everything up again.

Dammit, just leave it alone. I hate UI designers. They break everything they touch.

Re:If I wanted a Chrome interface, I'd use Chrome

[QuietLagoon]

... I hate UI designers. They break everything they touch.

UI designers are constantly trying to stay relevant. That is why they are continually changing the UI. They say the new version is better. They *always* say the new version is better. But a UI designer does not understand the very real difference between "different" and "better". To a UI designer, "different" is better, by definition. That is why they are always changing UIs, usually for the worse.

Re:If I wanted a Chrome interface, I'd use Chrome

[adiposity]

userChrome stuff will break, at least partly. The coloring of the tabs appears to be uncontrollable through CSS now without having your own SVG file.

Kind of a pain.

Re:If I wanted a Chrome interface, I'd use Chrome

[JDG1980]

userChrome stuff will break, at least partly. The coloring of the tabs appears to be uncontrollable through CSS now without having your own SVG file.

I don't want to see any tabs at all. Currently I use some userChrome.css magic to make tabs not appear when there is 1 tab, and various other entries to hide all the 'new tab' context menus and so forth. I have a bad feeling that this will break with the update, and I'll be really pissed off.

Re:Whole Browser Crash

[Blaskowicz]

Maybe you remember wrong? Partial crashes is a Chrome feature. I've always had total crashes with firefox (at least it lets me know instantly that something has crashed)
It was worse in old times as you would always lose the session, unless you installed an extension for that.

So much effort...

[koan]

Yet not one "feature" gives me what I really want, the ability to leave my UI the same while upgrading all the "under the hood features" and security fixes.

Re:So much effort...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is basically what Pale Moon is attempting (at least for Windows). (http://www.palemoon.org/)

Re:So much effort...

[strikethree]

Yet not one "feature" gives me what I really want, the ability to leave my UI the same while upgrading all the "under the hood features" and security fixes.

That is because you are an ignorant slob who wouldn't know good design if it bit you in the ass. You should be thankful that someone educated in the arts and in usability is improving your interface for you. Who wants to use those crappy, non-artistic interfaces that were "designed" by unenlightened engineers from days long forgotten?

Essentially, if you object to the interface, you are just an old fashioned luddite who is incapable of adapting to the modern world.

(this is the way "they" appear to think. not the way that i think)

Re:Thanks.

[koan]

Yep, I agree with the idea that Chrome sucks because of its "simple" (lack of user control) interface.

Re:Another Firefox redesign...

[koan]

Which is why comments are disabled on the video *smirk*

Re:Don't care

[rudy_wayne]

After "pushing out their CEO" for political / free speach reasons

Free speach [sic], you say? Obligatory xkcd. The CEO has a Constitution-enshrined right to say whatever he wants without fear of criminal prosecution, but Mozilla also has a right to boot him out of the company for it.

When you can have your ability to earn a living taken away from you, even though you have done nothing that violates any law, then you have effectively created a society where there is no free speech.

firefox gets worse every release

[Hognoxious]

They should hardcode the [not responding] in the titlebar. It would save everybody's time.

Re:firefox gets worse every release

[Reziac]

SM is better than FF that way, but it's still the only app that routinely pegs CPU at 100%, sometimes for no visible reason (nothing much happening).

One insanely stupid thing is that for some time now it won't save from cache. Instead, if you decide to save something, it RE-DOWNLOADS it. This is just marvelous when it's a 10mb image and your connection is slow... you get to download it twice, once to see it, once to save it. Is there a setting to make it look first in cache?

(Cache is what's fucking up/leaking memory, for that matter...)

Re:Don't care

[Anonymous Coward]

But "morally and ethically proper" is a different concept.

It has been a good while now that a significant percentage of the American public has supported ostracizing company heads for instances of racism. It looks like the tide is turning towards also taking a stand against those who refuse to affirm two people of the same sex expressing their love for one another through the same bond that straight couples have always had access to. At this point, suggesting that the campaign led against Eich is immoral or unethical, is a bit like impugning the civil rights struggle in the 1960s.

What is this fucking shit?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

You god-damn arrogant sons of bitches have fucked me for the last time! I do not want my fucking tab bar above my address bar. I do not want you to break my themes and extensions without warning! Why did you make a fucking configurable browser only to break the fucking user-configuration during upgrade? Was it too much trouble to put in a "Hey, if you choose to upgrade, we are going to totally wreck your shit. Hope you didn't like any of your custom changes, because that's all going away. Kthxbye!"

I also do not want my whole setup to be completely fucked when I downgrade this sorry piece of shit back to v28 (WHY ARE THERE 28 FUCKING VERSIONS???) I could spend the rest of my morning trying to fix the hash you made of my v28 or I could spend the rest of my day trying to fix the shitstorm you've conjured up in v29, but why should I fucking bother? I'm sure I'll just be doing it again in v42 next month. Fuck you, Firefox!!! You've sucked ass on Linux for years, and I am through!

Re:Don't care

[TheCarp]

Sure its legal, but think of what you are asking for when you raise such a scandal. You are effectively saying "I want employers to ask their employees about, keep tabs on, and base promotional consideration on what personal campaign contributions they decide to make".

Is that REALLY the world you want to live in? Would you accept that you were denied a promotion because you donated your personal monies to a cause you believed in? If they asked you why you made the donation, would you even feel you should have to answer them?

This was all very childish. I think very poorly of the anti-marriage equality crowd but, that doesn't mean I want them to have to answer for their politial beliefs in the workplace any more than I want to have to answer for mine. Lets not forget how many times and places this very same stance could have been used against gay activits. How many people would have decided against an HRC donation if they worried about having to answer questions about it at work?

I still use Firefox...on a Mac, occasionally

[BLToday]

I still use Firefox...on a Mac, occasionally. Actually, I don't use it but my wife does once in awhile. Her work requires either IE or Firefox. I miss the original Firefox philosophy: speed, stability, and security. OK, Firefox was never that stable (always leaking memory) and rarely the fastest. But it generally worked well and did the job.

Re:I still use Firefox...on a Mac, occasionally

[IamTheRealMike]

I guess most people forgot that when Firefox came out, it triggered a tidal wave of complaints from people who loved Mozilla/Seamonkey and hated how Firefox took away their favourite Netscape-era UI knob, or how much they loved Composer. But they had to do it to become relevant and Firefox went on to be very successful. Who knows if it's repeat of the same thing, I suspect this is not, but the original Firefox philosophy boiled down to "screw our existing tiny dying userbase, let's try and chase the IE users".

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, chrome uses up to four times more memory than chrome with only a fraction of the tabs open

Re:Don't care

[koan]

Which is the clearest reason the "Politically Correct Mafia" needs to be put in check.

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[houstonbofh]

They still break addons. Just look for Download Status Bar.

How? I can't find it anymore... Oh, wait... There is is. In Bookmarks, Most visited... /sarcastic_rant

Ok so far....

[Random2]

It hasn't yet horribly broken anything on me yet, so that's good; at least for now. Took a second to figure out how to get things back on the tool bar and where some options went (like History -> restore previous session), but nothing broken yet.

The 'feel' reminds me strongly of whatever UI design fad took over the phone market, and rounded tabs are... different I guess.

Poor Firefox what have they done to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dread each new Firefox release - how will they cripple and degrade the browser this time? This is the worst for me since they removed the status bar. Maybe one of the conditions of the Google funding is to gradually fuck up the browser to make it less attractive to those who don't like Chrome or IE?

Re:Poor Firefox what have they done to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I forgot to say - notice how they've disabled comments for the "demo video"? They know 99% of FF users will hate this redesign so they want to avoid the flood of negative comments.

Re:Poor Firefox what have they done to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is my suspicion. Someone is deliberately trying to ruin Firefox from the inside.

Re:Poor Firefox what have they done to you?

[0111 1110]

Yes. That would be Google. And they pay quite well.

Re:Poor Firefox what have they done to you?

[Reziac]

Y'all bring up a good point. Mozilla gets something like 90% of its funding from Google contracts (one wonders why Google doesn't buy Mozilla outright). What if the endgame here is to merge Firefox and Chrome, essentially making FF go away... easier to convert users if they're already trained to FF's version of the Chrome interface.

I detest Chrome, and I ain't goin' there. Sticking with SeaMonkey for the foreseeable future (and PaleMoon for the few sites that SM doesn't grok... interesting that right now the only one that's an issue is making comments on YouTube.)

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[gstoddart]

Around the time that memory became $8 per fucking gigabyte, you fucking tool.

Two things:

1) So, Firefox et al haven't "solved" a damned thing, they've just assumed that RAM is cheap and plentiful? I hope nobody is taking credit for that bullshit reasoning.

2) It's my fucking memory, and I may or may not be using it for other things. I've got 8GB on my machine, and every day or so I need to shut down Firefox to reclaim the memory it's been leaking. Firefox starts at around 300MB of RAM, and grows to 1GB if I let it.

Oh, and 3), go fuck yourself.

Re:Don't care

[TheGratefulNet]

gopher-vt100 ...has not had a forced upgrade in, well, a LONG time.

lol

Re:Don't care

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that REALLY the world you want to live in? Would you accept that you were denied a promotion because you donated your personal monies to a cause you believed in? If they asked you why you made the donation, would you even feel you should have to answer them?

It already is. If you smoke weed, entirely on your own time and not at work, you still can be denied employment for your viewpoints. You may believe that its not a problem; and in many areas of the country, its NOT a crime anymore; yet pre-employment 'screening' will often reject those who follow a different lifestyle afterwork.

Companies even look into your credit history even though you might be applying for a pure tech position.

They already do discriminate on pure bullshit. And since this shows no signs of the genie being put back into the bottle, I say that what the exec staff does in their own time, ALSO should be cause for firing.

You remove the pre-employment and spot-checks on what I do in my own time and I'll agree that what YOU do on your own time also does not matter. Companies: you need to go first since you broke things first.

Mod above up!

[houstonbofh]

That's the real reason UX people have destroyed this industry. Mobile has been where the money is for the past couple of years. Develop the UX designed to be used by large-pawed morons, and backport to desktop.

This right here... My desktop is not a fucking phone, and I don't want you to make it one. Yes, my opinion is in the minority... But the majority come to ME for IT advice and I will not recommend a craptastic abomination of a UI. You want a minimal browser? Chromium. You want a full featured browser? One of the Firefox forks that will be coming out soon. I wonder if I should register Cinnafox.org and FireMate.org yet...

It's a fad

[sjbe]

Not a UI/UX designer so I have to ask, why have designers hidden these basic menus in most browsers these days?

I think it's a fad and a rather annoying one at that because they tend to overdo it. They try so hard to hide things for the sake of appearance that they hide things that shouldn't be hidden. They worry about making it pretty instead of making it functional. I want functional first and if pretty follows then that's great.

Basically it's designers who understand aesthetics but not function. Artists without any engineering sense.

Re:Don't care

[Anonymous Coward]

After "pushing out their CEO" for political / free speach reasons, I uninstalled FF. If that is what their board is capable of then who knows what crap they pull with their software.

You're pretty much doing the same thing that Mozilla's board/employees did... removing a symbol of what you don't like from a position of direct prominence/power over you. The CEO, the employees, and yourself are all exercising your free speech rights.

Re:Don't care

[Anonymous Coward]

Eich's ability to earn a living has not been taken away from him. He is free to seek employment with a group of people that share his views, and it looks like that is what he has done. The state is not getting in his way, and there are still plenty of people who would hire him.

Speaking as someone from a country where one's right to earn a living, any employment at all, really was for decades commonly taken away from people for their political views, I can only say: get a sense of perspective.

tabs on the side

[Mirar]

I don't get this. Who is using so few tabs that they fit on one horizontal bar?

I usually end up with about 40-50 tabs after some browsing. I need them vertical, and I like to have them to the left. My *android* has a firefox with 35 tabs right now.

Which browsers support vertical tabs without any addon? (Currently using "tree style tabs", fearing 29 will break it.)

Re:tabs on the side

[Arkh89]

Group your tabs, CTRL+SHIFT+E.

Re:tabs on the side

[quixote9]

Yup. 29 breaks tree style tabs. It breaks the UI more than any other UI breakage they've done, which is saying a lot. Calling that "very customizable" is sort of like Wheeler saying that breaking the internet into toll roads is net neutrality.

Stay the hell away from it.

My personal solution has been to go to Iceweasel and put a hold on that, just in case they decide to follow FF to perdition.

Alternatively, hold the FF you've got (listed earlier in comments): sudo apt-mark hold firefox firefox-locale-en.

If you're on windows, people are recommending Palemoon.

Re:tabs on the side

[perryizgr8]

so people are actually using that piece of shit called "firefox for android"? just switch to chrome. excellent support for hundreds of tabs, simple+cool+responsive ui. in fact the tab switch ui is better than the desktop version's tab bar.

Fork You!, FF (Re:Use Pale Moon instead.)

[Tablizer]

It's a fork of FF engine with the older interface

Yay! A Got-Off-My-Lawn version is just what I want. I'll certainly look into it. I'm tired of the UI changing for change's-sake alone.

I wish they'd publish their justification and studies for the changes. That would encourage them to be less random.

Fucking fucking fucking fucking shitbags

[sootman]

> It's easy to see what tab you're currently visiting
> and the other tabs fade into the background to be
> less of a distraction when you're not using them.

I swear, if I ever meet a guy in a bar and he says he's on the UX team at Mozilla, I'm going to punch him in the dick as hard as I can. Now that all the background tabs are a mushy mass of grey, it is HARDER to tell them apart and jump to the one you want next. WHY DO YOU THINK TABS EXIST?!?!?

"when you're not using them" -- do you know what constitutes USING tabs? FINDING THEM AND CLICKING ON THEM.

Gee assholes, why don't you just put all my tabs behind that bullshit menu icon in the top right? That's be SUPER clean and easy-to-use! Out of sight, but right there when you need them! >:-|

If I wanted to know the title of the page I'M LOOKING AT RIGHT NOW -- not usually needed because I'M LOOKING AT IT RIGHT NOW -- I can glance at the title bar OH WHOOPS WAIT THAT'S FUCKING GONE TOO. Fucking retards.

Yes, I got the fucking extension to un-fuck-up the theme, but I shouldn't have to do this all the time.

Now, if they actually FIXED the sync, so you can just log in and not jump through the bullshit hoops of having a DIFFERENT instance of it open so you can type in the stupid PIN (WTF are you supposed to do if you want to sync two non-portable computers in different places?), *THAT* will be some progress.

For everything else, click here and tell them how much they suck.

And finally, a note to ALL browser makers: "View" -> "Source" should be a top-level menu, not buried behind some "developer tools" bullshit. FF, Safari, Chrome -- you're all guilty. "View source" is what made the web great. It SHOULD be easy to get at.

Re:Fucking fucking fucking fucking shitbags

[Elite Override]

My Firefox (Nighly 31) has View Page Source as a top-level menu.

Re:Fucking fucking fucking fucking shitbags

[Anonymous Coward]

> For everything else, click here and tell them how much they suck. [mozilla.org]

I tried.

I came to hit submit, did so, and was THEN told I need cookies enabled, to hit back arrow, enable cookies and retry.

The instructions do not work.

I then reloaded the page, but it reloaded to the beginning of the feedback page chain. Where practically every web-form under the sun fucks up, I habitually copy and paste the content into a text window, so I didn't have to re-type, BUT when on the second page of the chain, the next button now is greyed out and will not highlight.

Poor.

Re:Fucking fucking fucking fucking shitbags

[drafalski]

Gee assholes, why don't you just put all my tabs behind that bullshit menu icon in the top right?

A Firefox designer reading this comment just slapped his forehead and wondered why he hadn't thought of that.

Re:Fucking fucking fucking fucking shitbags

[ImprovOmega]

You make some good points (indistinct tabs is already annoying me), but one thing to point out - if you right click View Source is right there like it's always been. Still just two quick clicks away.

Though burying it in the menu bar strikes me as off-putting.

Re:Fucking fucking fucking fucking shitbags

[steelfood]

I swear, if I ever meet a guy in a bar and he says he's on the UX team at Mozilla, I'm going to punch him in the dick as hard as I can.

I'd suggest using your foot instead. It's more powerful, he won't see it coming, and you won't have to soil your hands with his privates.

Re:Fucking fucking fucking fucking shitbags

[KuanHon]

Restore title bar - go to Customise (usual rightclick in empty area after tabs), at the bottom left click 'Title bar' and Exit Customise to get it back. It's anyone's guess whether something is enabled or disabled, of course - I think if the background is darker then it's ENabled.

Re:Fucking fucking fucking fucking shitbags

[Badooleoo]

Yep and if the page has frames

*right click in the frame you want* This Frame > View Frame Source

Re:Popcorn

[Sri Ramkrishna]

You can replace firefox with GNOME 3, and it wlll be the same comments.

FF 29

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome is great if you trust Google not to spy on you.

No thanks.

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[compro01]

Yes. This addon was specifically developed for FF29 to deal with the new GUI.

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[Pseudonym Authority]

There is a way to get FF to stop using that memory. Go get a screwdriver, open your machine, then remove one of the RAM chips. Put the RAM in your desk drawer and reboot the machine. That memory is now guaranteed to be unused.

The new design is okay I guess

[DrXym]

I think the biggest win is the full screen / maximized mode which reclaims more vertical space. I don't think the curved tabs are a good idea since it makes the text area narrower (clipping more text with an ellipsis) and puts in useless curvy whitespace. I think settings should have stayed on the left since it is less discoverable and obvious on the right - the opposite side from where people expect menus to be.

Re:The new design is okay I guess

[noblebeast]

Expectations change. Anyone who uses Google Chrome will expect the menus to be on the right.

The more they fuck around with Firefox...

[dargndorp]

...the more I'm digging http://www.qupzilla.com/ Despite the name, not a Firefox fork. It's lightweight, does what I need and available for a bunch of operating systems.

Check for Updates - symbolic of FF

[Anonymous Coward]

And one other thing I hate, which I think is symbolic of FF - if you go to the "About Firefox", it says "Check for Updates".

When I first saw that and clicked, I thought it would do what it says - it would check to see if there *are any updates*. I mean, "check", right? it's English. It means "to see if something has happened". "Can you check the light is off?"

What it actually does is *install* the update. In English, we would say "Install Updates", or "turn the light off".

"Check if the light is off" does not mean "turn the light off". It might imply it and for something as trivial as a light being on or off we might act on that implication - but FF keeps changing it's UI, and it's a non-trivial change, one which is a hassle for me and which I do not always (or ever, really) wish for. FF assumes I will *always* want what it has to offer - and that is arrogant.

Re:Check for Updates - symbolic of FF

[Dagger2]

Now fixed in 29! Bug 600500.

Check that out: an actual improvement in Australis.

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[Mdk754]

It was basically made for the new firefox (it's been out for a bit, but practically made to undo australis)

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[Mirar]

I see. But it does nothing other than adding the status bar back, and even that only put an X and the RequestPolicy flag on it.

I don't see the menu toolbar I had before the upgrade (28), and a heap ton of icons clog the URL/searchbar instead of the status bar now.

The tabs are still rounded, and I want the square ones back. The pinned "app" tabs icons are squished.

Re:Don't care

[spitzak]

No you are not allowed to fire them directly, as two posters pointed out above (CA law, not sure about whereever you are). However apparently you *can* harass them until they are forced to resign, which is what happened.

PS: people are also free to boycott/picket your company for doing this.

This is terrible.

[trawg]

I love Firefox and have used it for years. I've put up with all the updates and changes and ridiculous behaviour since they started this rapid development cycle.

There's been some improvements. But every couple of releases my plugins break because they've removed some functionality or changed something. I can put up with that; software changes and needs maintenance.

This is the first upgrade I've done where my interface has been changed this significantly.

The Add-on bar is gone. Can't replace it without an extension. I have (well, had) tools in that I used daily.

Tabs now on top. Can't move them back to the bottom. Here's a two year old Bugzilla filled with people pleading that it remain an option.

There appears to be extensions to fix all this. But what's the fucking point any more? I'm sick of fighting to keep Firefox looking and working like Firefox if all they're going to do is take away the things that I actually use it for. It's just too much effort.

Mozilla, you used to be a leader. Now you're a follower. I know so few people that are still using Firefox - most people I talk to are surprised that I don't use Chrome - why are you going out of your way to alienate those of us that are left?

Re:This is terrible.

[cavebison]

I'm sick of fighting to keep Firefox looking and working like Firefox if all they're going to do is take away the things that I actually use it for. It's just too much effort.

You're not alone. I'd recommend PaleMoon, it's based on Firefox but the devs seem more sane. It even has a 64-bit version. Better than SeaMonkey IMO. I've used FF since v1, this is the first time I'm seriously moving to something else, in this case PaleMoon, because they seem to be focussed on what users originally came to Firefox for in the first place.

Re:This is terrible.

[zwarte piet]

The worst I think is that they want to hide what page I am on. The whole adressbar is only readable while typing it.... Are they fucking nuts?

Re:FF is a huge memory hog

[Anonymous Coward]

I share your pain.

Sadly there's no real alternative. All browsers fucking suck. I think it is because the web fucking sucks. Making a good browser for terrible abused tech is just not happening.

tabs

[JohnVanVliet]

the "about : config " setting for "tabs on bottom"
was removed !!!!!!!!!!!!

if you upgrade and not a new install the setting is there
BUT USELESS
and the "page reload" is NOT MOVABLE

Re:tabs

[JohnVanVliet]

I forgot to add ---

I knew there was a reason i use SEAMONKEY as my default browser
at least for now there is Firefox 24 LTS

Re:tabs

[Crispy Critters]

Indeed. I never figured out why everyone dumped Mozilla for Phoenix in the first place. (The memory usage and speed were identical for me on Linux.)

And a firefox is a freaking PANDA, not a fox, so change the stupid logo. Yes, I DO get insanely annoyed over pointless things, thank you for asking.

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[DarwinSurvivor]

Really? Is that why firefox, with only 6 tabs (mostly just text) open, is currently using almost half a gig of ram?

new window rather than tab

[JSilvers]

You are not the only one who prefers to open a new page (or source code file) in a new window; maybe the only guy. We are "working" in a windowed environment, not DOS.

Firefox 29: Because some people still liked it!

[runeghost]

And Mozilla is determined to fix that problem!

I've been using the Firefox-based Pale Moon browser for a while now, specifically so I don't have to deal with crap like this. It would be really nice if developers could figure out the concept of a mature piece of software, and focus on polishing performance instead of change for the sake of change. (And at the least, make UI changes optional.)

It's like a car company offering to let your bring your car into the shop, and they swap your headlight, signal, and wiper control around for free!

So rotate the monitor

[sjbe]

Because HDTV ruined our computer monitors. They have no vertical space anymore.

So rotate the monitor 90 degrees and tell your video card. Works great if it bothers you that much. Usually I like having my monitor horizontal but I get how vertical could be useful sometimes.

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[TheDarkMaster]

The kids today do not understand the idea that the resources of a computer are not for the exclusive use of their application.

Everybody, quit your bellyaching

[fustakrakich]

Use Seamonkey for the familiar Netscape interface you know you want, plus all the other features absent in Firefox, all with the same Mozilla motor.

Re:Everybody, quit your bellyaching

[rossdee]

I already use Seamonkey, as my 2nd browser (for example to do online banking, which I would like to keep separate from my normal browsing activities. (Also an earlier version of a Firefox upgrade (like 20 something versions ago) broke when trying to access that bank site.)

I think the UI dev team at Mozilla should be retasked, to something like testing the lethal injection drugs used for executions.

so.....they've solved everything else including...

[MoFoQ]

so.....they've solved everything else including...world hunger?

yea....on a side note, you are luckily....ff on my machine goes to 1.8GB in just a few hours....usually tops off at around 2.4GB until I have to 86 it.

oh, and for the AC, 4) repeat 3

Re:Don't care

[BZ]

Actually, they do not have that right. Employers in California are explicitly prohibited from doing that. See California Labor Code section 1102 at http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-...

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[Mumford]

Is it fair to blame Firefox for an addon that is abandon-ware? There is a certain "meet in the middle" point that everyone had to get to before these kinds of updates were no longer necessary.

all your UX equity R belongs to us

[epine]

After I buggered with the classic restorer and other bits, it's not killing me.

The underlying problem seems to be that the UX people pretend to represent a consensus, but we seem to constantly get a consensus of platforms, rather than a consensus of users.

This is far from a great interview, but the basic idea deserves some thought: Searls on the Intention Economy

The only way out of this mess is to create a marketplace of pull. When we have the capacity to advertise for what we really want in how our UX behaves, only then it will be fully revealed that there's no master ring to bind them all.

Claudia Caswell: Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?
Addison DeWitt: Because that's what they are

So then, why do all desktop UX updates since the adhesive iPad resemble psoriatic haemorrhoids?

Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered? Anyone ...

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[Mumford]

> Oh, when did Firefox (or Chome, or Safari) fix the issue of using too much memory?

They've been working on it for about two years now. And note that I didn't say they fixed it, it's just its memory usage is more in-line with Chrome or Safari

I'm not sure what you're doing with your browsers to cause them to steadily increase in memory while doing nothing. But since it's happening across browsers, you might point the finger inward rather than outward

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[compro01]

Hop into the addon's settings. There's numerous options allowing you to pick and choose what new stuff you want, such as the tab shape (you'll want one of the "squared tabs" options) and use the customize (right-click blank area of a toolbar) to move the icons out of the urlbar's toolbar.

I honestly don't remember how I got the menu bar back, though I did it somehow

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[compro01]

I dislike change for the sake of change.

Firefox 29, now with sleek and smooth tabs!

[fahrbot-bot]

The tabs are sleek and smooth to help you navigate the Web faster. It’s easy to see what tab you’re currently visiting and the other tabs fade into the background to be less of a distraction when you’re not using them.

Sigh, was this really a problem for anyone?

In related news, all I see here are a new bunch of things to disable or re-configure.

Memory hogging: Add-ons for re-starting Firefox

[Futurepower(R)]

"... a future dominated by retards." I think retards may rise in protest: "We may be retards, but we're not dumb!"

Let me guess: The new version of Firefox will be even less stable. The memory-hogging flaws have not been fixed. The memory-hogging flaws are so widely acknowledged that there are add-ons for re-starting Firefox: Firefox Re-start Add-ons. I use Restartless Restart.

Please no obvious replies to this. Please don't make it necessary to post my list of 22 excuses for not fixing the Firefox memory hogging again.

I'm having another problem with the latest version of Firefox. The toolbar icons change back to the default. I have to go to View > Toolbars > Customize and take away the ones I don't want and put back the ones I want.

Also, when I log into Slashdot, I'm recognized as my user name. However, often when I open a tab for a Slashdot story, the story shows that I am not logged in, and logging in at that tab does nothing. Re-starting Firefox fixes that problem for a while.

Re:Memory hogging: Add-ons for re-starting Firefox

[LinuxIsGarbage]

"... a future dominated by retards." I think retards may rise in protest: "We may be retards, but we're not dumb!"

Let me guess: The new version of Firefox will be even less stable. The memory-hogging flaws have not been fixed. The memory-hogging flaws are so widely acknowledged that there are add-ons for re-starting Firefox: Firefox Re-start Add-ons. I use Restartless Restart.

Please no obvious replies to this. Please don't make it necessary to post my list of 22 excuses for not fixing the Firefox memory hogging again.

I'm having another problem with the latest version of Firefox. The toolbar icons change back to the default. I have to go to View > Toolbars > Customize and take away the ones I don't want and put back the ones I want.

Also, when I log into Slashdot, I'm recognized as my user name. However, often when I open a tab for a Slashdot story, the story shows that I am not logged in, and logging in at that tab does nothing. Re-starting Firefox fixes that problem for a while.

Have they fixed Allow popups? I know the version at work, everytime (work) changes the OracleDB server name, I have to readd "allow popup for ..."

I can either show popup (this time), always allow popups from *** (but it won't show the popup), but I can't both show the popup this time, and always allow in the future.

Re:Don't care

[Antiocheian]

Obligatory xkcd

Oblige me.

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[corrosive_nf]

Go into addons and then go into the options for Classic theme restorer. All that is in there.

Pale Moon: Firefox with adult supervision.

[Futurepower(R)]

I forgot to mention Pale Moon, an interesting version of Firefox. It has adult supervision! What! Where did they find an adult?

Two examples: In Firefox the "Find in page" field is on the left and the "Highlight All" and "Match Case" buttons are on the right. In Pale Moon they are together so that you immediately see if something is chosen from a former search.

Pale Moon has a 64-bit version. Firefox doesn't. The 64-bit Pale Moon uses the Firefox add-ons; no problem there except with some unusual add-ons.

Pale Moon is completely independent. Pale Moon is in no way associated with Mozilla Foundation.

Re:Pale Moon: Firefox with adult supervision.

[L4t3r4lu5]

Pale Moon gets my vote; I switched around Firefox 24 and haven't glanced back. They keep the UI sane and intuitive instead of making needless cosmetic "eye-candy" changes (Who the hell cares if tabs have rounded edges?!), strip out needless code to speed up the browsing experience (No statistical reporting, no (disabled) built in PDF viewer, no adult controls, no automatic updating), and it's compiled specifically for newer processors, meaning the binaries are optimised for the system you run now, in exchange for not running on the system you had in 2003.

Re:Pale Moon: Firefox with adult supervision.

[TangoMargarine]

Just tried switching to Pale Moon in the last week here, and I like it (it brought back the classic download window! and status bar!). Only a couple little niggles: It seems to ignore the "open tab next to the current one" setting mentioned in the FAQ (but I use a vertical tab addon anyway so it doesn't really matter) and the close X for the search is on the opposite side of the bar from Firefox...but I'm half-conditioned to do a C-F Esc to close it anyway.

There *is* in fact a workable Linux version; you might just have to find it on Google since IIRC it wasn't listed on the official website as it's an unsupported build.

+5 Not Fucked Like Firefox

Re:Pale Moon: Firefox with adult supervision.

[TangoMargarine]

Pale Moon for Linux

Just untar and run the .sh.

Re:Pale Moon: Firefox with adult supervision.

[TangoMargarine]

Pale Moon for Linux

Re:Pale Moon: Firefox with adult supervision.

[Zanadou]

Only a couple little niggles: It seems to ignore the "open tab next to the current one"

about:config --> modify/create Boolean " browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent " --> set to " true "

Re:Pale Moon: Firefox with adult supervision.

[Zanadou]

There's also a version of Pale Moon compiled for Linux, with an installer.

Re:Pale Moon: Firefox with adult supervision.

[TangoMargarine]

Yes, that's what everyone says to do, but it doesn't work. It still inserts new tabs at the right end of the tab bar. Middle-clicking on a tab puts it next to it, sure, but that's not everything.

Re:Don't care

[noblebeast]

If you use Firefox, you're a Mozilla customer. They're making money off you, and you're using their software.

Well, I trust Mozilla more than Google

[Gordo_1]

I honestly don't have too many gripes about the redesign. You can still get to the old menu by hitting alt and the drag and drop UI customization flows are better than before. The tabs? meh, they were fine before, they're fine now. Moving the old orange firefox drop-down to the right side and re-arranging the buttons ala Chrome? Meh. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

I still use it because performance is decent, it's reasonably stable and I feel like Mozilla is slightly less interested in spying on everything I do than Google is.

Also, I've noticed that Firefox has lost a lot of market share in the past few years, which probably means it will be less of a target for hackers going forward.

Re:Don't care

[Trailer Trash]

But "morally and ethically proper" is a different concept.

It has been a good while now that a significant percentage of the American public has supported ostracizing company heads for instances of racism. It looks like the tide is turning towards also taking a stand against those who refuse to affirm two people of the same sex expressing their love for one another through the same bond that straight couples have always had access to. At this point, suggesting that the campaign led against Eich is immoral or unethical, is a bit like impugning the civil rights struggle in the 1960s.

No, the tide isn't turning. Frankly, it's a few loudmouths who go nuts when they don't get their way. If you want to see how much sway they hold in the real world, do a google search for Chik-Fil-A's highest sales day. I'll give you a hint: it happened when the looney left decided to boycott them.

All my tabs are light gray, old menus still there

[Blaskowicz]

I guess I was lucky, for not using Windows or Mac OS and because of luck with my GTK theme. But I'm now somehow liking the UI.
I knew what was coming so I was prepared to see some new styling and loss of features. But first thing is, it kept the classic menu bar after upgrading (File, Edit, View etc.). Title bar is intact too. Same deal as I got when running Firefox >= 4 on linux.
Then, perhaps because my background for menu bar was gray, the "background", inactivated tabs are on light gray as well. So I don't have high contrast between tabs at all! That's funny as it was one of the main points in screenshots and video.

All my extensions still work (a handful ones, but they're vital). My zooming buttons on toolbar (from the browser's stock featureset) were even still there. Customization is as every bit as easy as promised, within the limitations of course.
Here how it was almost out of the box (bookmark buttons removed and maybe some minor things)
http://i.imgur.com/kZ50vQJ.png

I then learnt you can put icons besides the classic menu bar, and they will be smaller than on the navigation bar. So I did. (zooming buttons are smaller and easier to use there.)
I do have a few usability improvements (gained an icon for an extension, can zoom to 100% with one click, moved some stuff to the top bar. Current tab is somewhat easier to find with the curve)

"Sandwich menu" can't be moved or removed (I assume it's a sandwich with a slice of bread in the middle. Bread sandwich!) but can be cleaned up a little and ignored 99% of the time. I was lucky, won't go back to older versions.. I don't want to be an apologist, just wanted to share my experience of having it easy (this time?)
It's still full of features not found in the Google Chrome UI. (such as middle-click scrolling and regular menus)

Here's the UX blog entry waiting for responses

[Anonymous Coward]

Have at it

Search in addressbar == Goodbye privacy

[jopsen]

Then I'm not interested. Seriously, chrome has gotten me way to lazy in this regard. And FF has frustrated me on this since (and yes, I know there is an add-on).

it's basically, privacy issue... chrome will send everything you type in the address bar to servers. That is who search and address bar are split in Firefox.

Eh, I think I will stick to Firefox 2.0.0.20

[jonadab]

No, seriously, I think I will just continue to use Firefox 2.0.0.20, like I've been doing ever since I uninstalled the festering pile of excrement that was Firefox 3.

It *would* be kind of nice to have an updated Gecko, with support for things like inline-block, but eh, it's not worth the tradeoff in the UI.

Been with FF since the logo was a phoenix

[quixote9]

And as their UX crumbled, I'd take as much time as it took to get it working right for me again. I loved Firefox, loved the openness, user control, the community. I converted everybody I could to it who wasn't already on it.

Well, not any more. "Precariously one step away" from more Mozilla idiocy about sums it up and I've had enough. This time I'm not spending hours fixing everything the UX'tards broke. I've moved to Iceweasel and locked the version. You may want to try that too.

Maybe that solution will work for enough years (generations?) for open source browser devs to remember that open source was supposed to be about user control and choice.

DETEST

[markdavis]

I absolutely, positively *DETEST* the UI redesign. I immediately installed https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

I have no idea why they would want to ruin a perfectly good browser like this. There is nothing wrong with having REAL menus on the top line, nor the ability to have tabs on the bottom, where they belong. It is beyond reason why they would not make such a change OPTIONAL... resorting to an addon is a huge and irritating kludge that will annoy the S*** out of me every time I have to install a new Firefox somewhere and will likely cause breakage later.

Color me very, very annoyed.

Re:DETEST

[markdavis]

It worked fine for me yesterday, that is all I know. Have not tried it again since then... yet

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[ShakaUVM]

>Yes. This addon was specifically developed for FF29 to deal with the new GUI.

If past experience is any guide, FF30 will break functionality for extensions that allow you to use the old GUI.

For example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

Re:Don't care

[OhPlz]

If the tide is turning, why are you posting as a coward?

Re:Beta Sucks

[bughunter]

'Minimalism' is driven by Marketing, so that you can hide the UI for a nice pretty glossy magazine ad or catchy TV advert.

'Minimalist' is not useful. It's photogenic. Period.

What the hell is so important?

[itomato]

What is *so goddamned critical your life* that you can't fork that fucking version and keep patching it to build/run? The ability to force monospace fonts? Stupid hacks that are probably a bad idea or a legit 'bug' in the first place?? What?

*Sigh*

[norite]

Time to look for another cross platform browser that doesn't look like shit.

Le Sigh....

Re:Popcorn

[ChunderDownunder]

You ain't seen nothing yet.

Just wait until KDE 5.0 is released with Qt 5.x on Wayland.

The future, folks. Only performance will suck on my GMA 950 integrated graphics. :)

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[Rufty]

Yeah, they've been working on the firefox memory leaks for about two years now. But they've been a problem for about ten years now. And six years of that was finger pointing at the users, which is why it still thrashes like a dying whale.

Re:Popcorn

[bezzeb]

You are so right. I'm gonna go get some popcorn also to soothe my rage....

If they keep doing this a few more times, we will see a proper fork emerge and perpahs Mozilla would run out of funds just like Gnome did recently.

We don't need our desktops to be made as idiotic as our tablets. Workstations are for time constrained creation, tablets are for casual consumption. UX designers need to keep this straight and optimize them respectively.

New but inferior sync

[chrisvdb]

So, the new FF finally implemented a more userfriendly sync functionality. Apparently less than 1% of its users was using the old (but very secure system). The new sync system is (unsurprisingly) similar to Chrome's sync system: you create an account, when you log in your info is encrypted based on your account password and uploaded to Mozilla's servers.

What I cannot get my head around is that Mozilla claims they cannot access your data (as they don't know your password) but that they are able to reset a lost password... how can that be a secure system??

Also, in the new version it's no longer possible to use a master password... if you want to use sync all your password will be in plaintext (well, obfuscated) in FF's password file. Any malicious or vulnerable application can get access to ALL your passwords. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=995268

Doesn't sound like an improvement to me...

Re:New but inferior sync

[hydrofix]

Also, in the new version it's no longer possible to use a master password... if you want to use sync all your password will be in plaintext (well, obfuscated) in FF's password file. Any malicious or vulnerable application can get access to ALL your passwords. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

My reaction when reading this

Re:New but inferior sync

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Also, in the new version it's no longer possible to use a master password... if you want to use sync all your password will be in plaintext (well, obfuscated) in FF's password file. Any malicious or vulnerable application can get access to ALL your passwords. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

Doesn't sound like an improvement to me...

This is a HUGE, MAJOR fuckup.

Really, they shouldn't have rolled out the new sync without having some kind of solution to this. I have hundreds of randomly-generated passwords for various sites and because I use multiple computers, I rely on Firefox to sync them. I have a secure master password set on all of these computers, but now that sync refuses to work properly, I'll either have to disable my master password (not gonna happen), rely on a third-party piece of software such as KeePass or literally copy down all of my passwords to paper and carry them around with me.

This is absolutely ridiculous, and almost as insane as the Pidgin developers' insistence on saving all account passwords in a plain-text XML file "because anything else is just security by obscurity".

Re:New but inferior sync

[Dagger2]

What I cannot get my head around is that Mozilla claims they cannot access your data (as they don't know your password) but that they are able to reset a lost password... how can that be a secure system??

They can't. You can, by decrypting all your data and then reencrypting it with a new key.

To be more specific, they can always reset your password, but if they (rather than you) do it, any data encrypted with kB will be lost. Any data encrypted with kA can be retained, because Mozilla have access to kA, which is more of an obfuscation key than an encryption key. (Currently, all data is encrypted using kB.)

Not realistically having password sync though... I didn't know that. That's, uh, unfortunate. Kinda limits the usefulness of Sync, I'd say. And apparently no info as to why other than a link to bug 986637 which is inaccessible to me :(

Re:New but inferior sync

[chrisvdb]

The Mozilla devs seem to think that disk encryption is a better solution than an encrypted password file... but they forget that an encrypted disk does not protect against vulnerable/malicious applications reading your password file. Or leaving you computer unlocked for a few minutes. The old sync version will be removed 'as soon as possible' (in the dev's words) so at that point we'll have to choose between not upgrading, not sync'ing or not locally encrypting the password file.

Please consider voting for the bug on Bugzilla. This might help too: https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/feedback.

Molasses mode

[BillX]

All (valid) complaints about the continuing dumbing-down of the interface aside, have they fixed the FF28 behavior where opening a new tab/window gets progressively slower with use, until after a few days of use, opening one freezes FF and pegs the CPU for upwards of 20 seconds before it appears? (Or just crashes.)

Closing and re-opening FF resets the molasses clock, but that's a poor substitute for just working correctly in the first place.

Re:Molasses mode

[markdavis]

I have to admit that I also noticed this improvement. The last several versions of Firefox were becoming very painful to use because of such performance issues and I would have to close and reload Firefox every few days because of it.

Everything seems MUCH faster now. It is a shame they ruined the user interface at the same time :(

Re:Popcorn

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Hah. :) They get away a lot easier than us, GNOME guys. Everbody bitches about what's gone, but not what we've added or improved. I'm sure it will be the same for KDE 5.0.

firefox swears

[tehgingercat]

I would like a list of your firefox anger-related swears.

Re:UX idiots...

[rossdee]

Is there some option you can set to un-grey them. Can we change the background color of those tabs to make them sorta visible?
(I mean its not like we are running out of colors or anything on a 32bit screen)

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[swillden]

I've got 8GB on my machine, and every day or so I need to shut down Firefox to reclaim the memory it's been leaking.

Are you sure about that? Do you understand how modern OSes use RAM?

Try disabling swap, then running Firefox for a day or two, so it appears to be hogging all your RAM, then start up an app that actually does allocate, say, 6 GiB. Then check the FF usage. Do the same experiment with swap enabled. If FF is doing things right, the behavior should be the same, and in both cases you should see FF memory "consumption" drop dramatically when something else demands all the RAM.

If the other program can't actually get the memory it needs (with swap disabled), then FF actually leaks. I suspect it doesn't. (Note that I don't use FF).

Re:Popcorn

[bornagainpenguin]

First, since you seem to be the big apologist for the travesty that Gnome has become, allow me to say 'Fuck you.'

Secondly...

Everbody bitches about what's gone, but not what we've added or improved.

Maybe this is because what's been added isn't an improvement? Maybe what was there before needed not to be removed or rewritten, but to have the bugs fixed? Oh that's right I forgot, you guys think chasing the new shiney is more important than fixing bugs or servicing an existing userbase. I guess that brings me back to point one....

Re:Don't care

[thunderclap]

Opera. It still works well.

Re:New but inferior sync. MOD PARENT UP!

[quixote9]

MOD PARENT UP! Up, up, up. I haven't seen that noted anywhere else yet. And that strikes me as pretty damn critical in the current environment.

All I want is a browser again

[holophrastic]

Over the past decade, I've watched browsers get more and more non-browsing features. Really, I'm not at all interested. Yes I'm a web developer, no I don't need the development console; I don't need the developer tools; I don't need the javascript error console either. I don't need plug-ins, I don't need add-ons. I don't need network monitors. I don't need customizable toolbars; I don't need toolbars at all.

I need an address bar. Tabs still don't work the way I would find valuable, so I can take them or leave them. Smart address bars don't provide the features I'd want either, so I don't need that either. Spellcheck is also just as useless as it's always been for anyone working across multiple jargonous industries.

All I've ever wanted is a window, with a titlebar and a border, and the web page on the inside. The closest thing to stripped-down that I seem to be able to get is a stripped-down IE -- I can get it down to a fairly thin address bar with or without tabs. Everything else (safari, opera, chrome, firefox) is either slow, bloated with features, bloated with icons, or bloated with "usability"; or it takes ten seconds to open a new process, or you can't open a new process (process vs window), or it just eats memory.

I don't need a UI. The web-page is the UI. I don't need a UI to a UI. I have a mouse, and a keyboard, and a web-site. The browser ought to be transparent.

And they still don't show upload progress. It's been thirty years of download progress though. I'm just saying.

The Best Browser Only Keeps Getting Better

[toudaimori]

Wow, so much hate in here. You people are like horrible old women. I for one like the new UX a lot. My biggest gripe with 29.0 is probably the Google Chrome "hamburger style" menu icon and the round back button, which can probably both be fixed with add-ons.

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[kbahey]

I've got 8GB on my machine, and every day or so I need to shut down Firefox to reclaim the memory it's been leaking. Firefox starts at around 300MB of RAM, and grows to 1GB if I let it.

I had 4GB and upgraded to 8GB, and have 1200+ tabs open in 19 windows. Firefox is fast, and the whole laptop is smooth.

Just install NoScript and don't enable Javascript for any but the sites you use more often. This way Flash ads will not play, and memory usage will be far less.

And make sure you disable Firebug as well as YSlow if you have them.

First impressions

[hydrofix]

Booted to Ubuntu, it wants to install new Firefox. Okay. Here are the first impressions: TL;DR: It's terrible. The designer hipsters are now ruining Firefox, too.

1. Why are the tabs again above the URL bar? I have configured them time after time below. But this time, the option to put them back below is gone even from about:config! WTF?

2. Where has the "add-on bar" gone? Wasn't it enough that the status bar was replaced with the buggy text that shows on mouse hover?

3. Google "firefox 29 tabs below url bar", people are recommending this add-on. Thought: has Firefox really gone the way of Windows 8 where you need to install 3rd party extension (Classic Shell) to band-aid the catastrophic damage the hipster designers have done to the original product?

4. Reboot the browser after installing the extension. Spend 20+ minutes making everything as close as possible to what is what before.

5. Finally, continue working. About 2 hours in, suddenly my back/forward buttons stop working. Assume the extension is interfering with core somehow. Fortunately, rebooting the browser helps. Some time later, this happens again, need to again reboot Firefox.

6. Seriously consider switching to Google Chrome. The few reasons to use Firefox are evaporating fast.

Overall experience: 30min spent fiddling with Firefox settings. There is currently no easy way to make it like it was before. If you are running Firefox 28, I would suggest waiting a few weeks before upgrading until there is an easy and tried way to un-fuck the UI.

Master password and Sync

[KozmoStevnNaut]

One really major pain in the ass that has been introduced in this version is the "feature" that disables password syncing if you have a master password set. This has been in the Android version for a while, and now it's been put in the desktop version, too.

WHY?!

I use randomly-generated passwords for most of the sites I visit, for security. I literally have hundreds of these passwords, and they're all saved in Firefox' password manager, protected with a master password. Previously, I could sync these between my various computers with no trouble at all. They all had a master password set. But now I have to remove a layer of security in order to sync my passwords? It's either that, or manually write down and copy them, which is obviously less secure.

I simply cannot fathom the thought process that led to this decision.

Pale Moon has a strong opinion against FF4 v29

[advid.net]

Me too.

I'll tell them I no longer like FF by moving away of FF and uninstalling it on 1 Mac, 3 Win, 2 Linux (home) and 2 other Win (pro).

I think I'll try Iceweasel or Pale Moon.

I'd like to quote this from Pale Moon info page:

In addition, later versions of Pale Moon aim to provide more freedom of choice than Mozilla about how people want to browse the web, which tools or extensions they wish to use, and which feedback users want to see; efficiency, after all, should not stop at the engine of a browser, but extend to all parts of it, including the user interface.
Specifically, Firefox 4 and later have redesigned the user interface after the visions of the Mozilla Firefox product directors and user experience team to provide a more minimalist interface; unfortunately also removing essential functions and making a few less logical design choices, confusing minimalism with cleanliness.
Later on, with "Australis", much more has been changed, breaking in many ways with previous versions, standard user interface conventions and ergonomics, as well as proper visual integration with the operating system.

Time for a new Firefox

[strikethree]

Firefox was created to make the Mozilla browser lean and mean. I seem to recall downloads smaller than 5 megabytes for it.

Now? Just wow. It is a huge, bloated, monstrosity of crap. Again.

Time for a new Firefox.

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[Mirar]

Too late now. And it's a serious bother to stop Ubuntu to automatically upgrade stuff. (I know it can be done, but come on, I'd have to read a man page or google about it and I rather spend that time getting the old look back if people say it's possible.)

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[Mirar]

I got everything neat except the addons that doesn't like to be in the status bar (which I suspect is a problem with those addons) and that the menu bar is hidden under a grey firefox-and-arrow icon. There's probably something clever I should do there.

Re:Don't care

[TheCarp]

> It already is. If you smoke weed, entirely on your own time and not at work, you still can be denied employment for your viewpoints.

You think I don't know this? Not only do I smoke weed but I advocate for declaring it was never illegal and the people who enforced the laws against it members of a criminal conspiracy. You think I am not aware that I could loose my job or even be denied jobs over such opinions, possibly without even being told why?

It sucks, its bullshit, and I don't go wishing my uncomfortable sutuations on others out of spite without even knowing positively whether they are individually at fault. If he advocated for the firing of people over their beliefs or advocated for pre-employment drug screening (never taken one myself, not once; in fact, even when on the phone with HR people talking about taking a job for significantly more than I was currently making, I always steel myself ready to reject with comments about how I didn't apply to be a whore)

I feel like my mother...

[CFBMoo1]

When I switched my mother from XP to Windows 7 she had a heck of a time finding where things worked and how they worked again. This UI change that is spreading all over the software world to make things more touchy feely like is really not sitting well with me when I use it on a non-touchy feely desktop. Part of me is glad that I kept my mother on IE at this point even though IE is bullet riddled with issues of it's own. The UI is at least somewhat consistent to the desktop for the most part on Windows 7.

Re:Don't care

[Barefoot Monkey]

I doubt Mozilla was responsible for, or even wanted, that scandal. If they didn't want him to be CEO then all they needed to do was... not make him CEO in the first place. Whether Mozilla pressured him to leave because of the scandal (not "perfectly fine" at all) or whether he chose to do so of his own accord is something that you and I can only speculate.

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[0111 1110]

To deal with developers who have never seen or heard of a change they didn't like. Who don't need a reason to make a change other than it being different or rather MORE LIKE CHROME. Or just to give the original user base who liked the original UI design the finger.

Then why don't you lead by example

[TangoMargarine]

N/A

Re:Is it going to break the API?

[alexo]

Is it fair to blame Firefox for an addon that is abandon-ware?

Yes, it is, because the (salaried) FF developers keep removing useful features under the impression that some (unpaid) extension writers will re-implement them and provide permanent support .

Re:The solution is easy....

[0111 1110]

This is a good point. I'd consider downgrading to a version that my favorite theme worked with and just stick with that. Especially in Linux which doesn't have Pale Moon.

Thanks, Mozilla

[mlnease]

What new curbs to customization will you think of next? Why do you think we don't use Chrome/Chromium? I like your products, I've used them faithfully for years and I sincerely thank your developers for all their fine work. Now please stop dreaming up useless, arbitrary new 'features' that serve only to make Firefox look "New! Improved!" Haysoos Marimba.

Jumping ship

[RzTen1]

I used to be a theme developer until this update, but with the recent UI changes I give up. I've been dealing with their crappy versioning system which makes addon development and testing a total pain in the ass, but this is just too much. There are only so many things I'm willing to fix. With 28 I was running 6 addons just to restore basic theme functionality and adding even more and getting a 'kinda but not quite what it was' look with 29 isn't worth it.

I don't understand why the UI needed 'fixing'. Where there a sea of complaints coming in that I couldn't see? The only ones in bugzilla seem to be people asking for old features to be restored or to fix the memory problems. I guess this means the UI is more important then all the other bugs at this point. I suspect we'll be seeing a spike of people stuck on 28, or just dropping Firefox entirely. If you want a Chrome browser you pick Chrome, and not a knockoff clone.

Fun and simple bookmarks?

[dysmal]

Whenever i see the phrase "fun and simple" i know the product will be neither fun nor simple.

Addon to fix new UI

[Xolve]

There is an addon which will fix these issues: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

Re:Use firefox ESR

[Keybounce]

** Mod Parent Up **

I was just about to post this same thing. I have been using 24 ESR (and 17 ESR, for PPC compatibility) for a while now. I was fortunate enough to NOT get this bleep today.

My mother, on her microsoft windows based system, was wondering "What has happened? Where has my gmail gone?"

Massive change, just for the sake of change, with no warning, with no user awareness, with no customization? I used to think that only Microsoft could pull such bleep on us.

A note to designers

[cwsumner]

If the customer wants to do something with the software, then (if at all possible) it should work.
There is more than one way to do things, and you don't get to decide what way the customer uses. Not if you want to succeed!
Successful software gives the customers more choices, not less, and makes it easy to set the choices they want. That's what a good UI is -for-.

Re:Popcorn

[Sri Ramkrishna]

I'm afraid you're going to see this happening in just about every other project as well. KDE is doing the same things as we are. You might consider me an apologist but I do admit when things are wrong in the project, but since you're overall bitching about the entire concept, I don't think we'll ever see eye to eye on this. In any case, sorry GNOME didn't work out for you. I hope you continue to use Linux desktops though.

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[Noah Haders]

The tabs are still rounded, and I want the square ones back.

dude, you need to chillax or take some meds if you're so heavily invested in the shape of your browser tabs.

Re:and addons work on a new firefox?

[Mirar]

I was promised square tabs!

Tabs on top appears to be forced now?

[AbRASiON]

I fucking HATE tabs on top.
Why would I want tabs on top?
When I'm looking in a goddamn filing cabinet, do all the identification tabs per file, float 3" above the file itself? NO.

I want my tabs DIRECTLY above my content. I do not want to look over / past at the address bar or the bookmarks bar to see the tab I'm using. I do not agree with this UI change, I don't agree with the wankers who insist it's best, and I very much don't agree with the person who signed off on about:config "Browser.tabs.ontop" no longerworking.

Stop fucking messing with things, this means YOU google, mozilla, microsoft. STOP.

No testers?

[WeHaveLiftoff]

I remember when Australis was in testing... Perhaps if all of the people complaining about missing features had tested it and told Mozilla "hey, this is a stupid idea", maybe they would have realized users like having a toggle-able add-on bar, etc. If no one speaks up and everyone just sits around and throws shit, how the hell are they to know what users actually want?

Mozilla Changes Name to Mozillasoft

[Raved Thrad]

Today Mozilla announced that it was changing its name to Mozillasoft, to more accurately reflect company policy and attitudes. Spokesman Hugh Janus said, "We rolled out version 29 because, well, fuck you all. We've been working on our take on Windows 8, browser-style, and now that it's out there you can all just suck it. Just wait until our next update, when we're going to make sure to break all those add-ons that take you away from the ant-colony purity of Australis. We're done bending over backwards to accommodate users who want this button here and that control there. From now on, it's our UI, or you can go and die! Tabs on top! Tabs on top!"

Re:Popcorn

[x_t0ken_407]

I assume you're saying this because of the horror of the KDE3 -> KDE4 debacle. Since you're obviously not aware of the reasons things happen the way they did, allow me to inform you that the move to "KDE 5.0" will in no way be the same huge jump (i.e., complete rewrite). I'll leave it up to you to do your own research, v.s. nitpicking what's wrong about the FUD you just spewed.

Re:Heresy!

[plover]

And not only is this a lie they tell themselves to justify their excesses in breaking user compatibility, but it's a lie that's been thoroughly disproven in the marketplace. Microsoft tried it with Windows 8 - there has been nothing but negative response from anyone with a desktop who is trying to use a mouse on a touch interface. Despite having possibly the best core OS Microsoft has ever produced, Windows 8's UI is a screaming failure. 8.1 is proof: they pasted on a clunky, weirdly appearing top bar with a lone "close window [X]" button and proclaimed it mouseable. In their rush to make their desktop an iPhone clone, they forgot that their users don't and can't use iPhones with a mouse.

These outside "UX designers" (and I use that term loosely) have completely misunderstood the source they think they're trying to mimic. Apple never converged desktop and iPhone interfaces. What Apple did brilliantly was to provide common services to both platforms (even though it was done strictly to keep people locked within their walled garden.) But an iPhone interface is nothing like a Mac OS interface, and a Mac OS interface is nothing like an iPhone interface. Why? Because touch, mouse, and keyboard are three completely different human experiences, and they require three completely different approaches to UI; otherwise your users will be uncomfortable in the non-native interface.

Mozilla also fails completely to understand design principles about compatibility. The Open Close principle states that you can always add an interface to a class without penalty, but you must never modify or change an existing interface. This is not a principle that makes a class better (indeed, it often makes a class less clear); it's a principle that ensures the class doesn't do something bad to its existing consumers. It enables safe upgrades. Wanting to change the existing interface is the violation that Mozilla continues to commit with the Rapid Release program. Instead of changing users (who are *guaranteed* to have problems with every change), they should provide the new features as an add-on. Enable them by default or not, doesn't matter, but you DO NOT CHANGE THE EXISTING INTERFACE.

Not so

[MoarSauce123]

You can say whatever you want and that is guaranteed by the Constitution. What the Constitution does not protect anyone from is the consequences of statements made! And yes, that includes criminal prosecution as it happens plenty of times when people employ hate speech (as seen here in the comments by use of the word "faggot"). You are free to yell "Fire!", but not in a crowded theater. Ask the gazillion folks that get fired from their jobs because the company doesn't make quarterly numbers that appease the shareholders. I find that to be an even worse reason than suggesting that someone steps down due to their medieval right extremist conservatives views that just do not jive with a corporation banking on innovation and modern thinking.

Dumb design

[MoarSauce123]

Entering a URL and entering a search term are two distinctly different things. They should not be mushed together into the same control, especially since FF has a dedicated control for searches. Searching in the address field is like calling your friend and getting directory assistance at the same time. In which universe does that make sense?

Re:Dumb design

[robsku]

I disagree. And it's one of many many things why I like eLinks over Links1/2/Hacked, w3m or other text-mode browsers (defined in Options: Protocols->URI Rewriting->Smart Prefixes). Sometimes one facility for multiple different functions is indeed a Good Thing.

There is little reason to limit browsers main text based access field to one access method (URI's) - especially if there's a way to limit what you can do from that field somewhere in browser setting (not sure, but I recall seeing such settings in FF). I've optimized my browser for quick keyboard only access (I also have add-on for mouse gestures, the point being avoiding having to change between the controlling devices unnecessarily) with such add-on's as Keysnail and Mouseless Browsing, yet I don't even remember the hotkey for search field (I only use it to select "Manage Searches..." or to add new search engines) as searching is way easier done from the general access field, prefixing the phrase or URL (latter comes handy when quickly accessing translate.google.com for current URL with C-l C-a t [space] [return]) with letter or short word for engine/site to search (s->startpage.com,g->google.com,w->wikipedia(en),wfi->wikipedia(fi),sana->sanakirja.org(multi-language dictionary),y->youtube, etc.).

I also like how it can list bookmark entries matching the word(s) you type, often giving access to what you want faster than through bookmarks menu - which I have naturally sorted into subfolders up to reasonable level, but that doesn't help at all when what you're looking for could reasonably exist in more than one subfolder; which is where matching your words to bookmark/subfolder names and keywords comes very convenient and quick.

I use that field for those three reasons, I know when I'm using it to type URL or search or to find bookmarks, and the browser knows it well enough to present what I'd expect in dropdown list just perfectly. God knows what could there possibly be that I would find better in usability (THE keyword) with having to use three separate fields for each access method but I'm sure that, with proper settings and possibly add-on's, it could be done with FF if someone likes it better that way. As it is now, I don't know what there is to complain in the way it currently works, even if you don't want to use the field for searching: Enter the URI you want and off it goes anyway. Only thing that annoys me is not knowing another way to access "Manage searches..." than through search field's drop down menu, which unfortunately keeps me from removing the separate search field from the UI alltogether.

Plenty of bugs to fix in FF

[MoarSauce123]

I agree, FF still leaks memory as if there is no tomorrow and with a dozen tabs open it eventually uses up so much RAM that it has no other choice than to crash. Desktop and mobile are two very distinct experiences. Crafting one UI that runs on both is nothing but pure laziness. Take look at the FF forums and read the responses of the Mozillas. The FF team is filled with egocentric morons that use the FF project solely as a means for self-service. They code stuff that they like and give no thought to what users want despite user being quite clear about it. And then then Mozillas wonder why FF market share goes down.Well, the product sucks, that's why!

Re:UX idiots...

[Badooleoo]

You can: http://www.dedoimedo.com/compu...

More to the point you can set colours with Classic Theme Restorer https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

Best not to mention Feng-Shui practitioners...

[Hognoxious]

I was wondering whether to say architects or civil/structural engineers. I figured they're more like the actual coders.

He probably won't like that either, will he?